{ "episodeId": "SLP14", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo": { "name": "Jeff Gallas of Fulmo", "role": "guest", "tag": "JEFF" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:01", "start": 0.68, "text": "Hey guys, welcome to Stephan Livera podcast episode fourteen. My guest today is Jeff Gallas. Hey Jeff, thanks for coming on the show. Good morning," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "00:10", "start": 10.17, "text": "thank you for having" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 10.79, "text": "me. Excellent. So Jeff, you work at, or you are the star, you are the founder of Fulmo, so just to quickly intro Jeff to the listeners, Jeff is a founder of Fulmo, which is an enterprise based in German, in Berlin, in Germany, and this, and Fulmo is dedicated to research and development of the Lightning Network and blockchain scaling, and he is also the lead organizer of Lightning Hack Day. And so he is a blockchain consultant, investor, and entrepreneur. He's been in the Bitcoin- Game since 2011, and he consults and runs workshops on Bitcoin, and I believe you're also the founding director of the German Bitcoin Foundation. So definitely a long and, involved, past with Bitcoin. maybe you can open it up with your story on Bitcoin, Jeff." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "01:01", "start": 60.95, "text": "Yeah, sure. as you correctly said, I started, I think I discovered Bitcoin in 2011 when sort of, for me, one of the first waves of mainstream press covered Bitcoin, and I pretty much just read an article about it, and as you, you might have heard the story before from other people, for me everything clicked together and it made a lot of sense, so I didn't stop reading about it and researching, pretty much until today. And it's been a couple years already, and I've done a couple of enterprises and projects, amongst them, as you said, the German Bitcoin Coin Foundation or Association, which, was also, or it still is a, a pretty interesting adventure, if you will, but I'm not really doing anything for them anymore. It was early days, I would say." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:59", "start": 118.51, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool. well, I think it's fascinating that the world we're moving into now, it's a Bitcoin-centric world, and someday down the line, we're gonna need more developed infrastructure, and part of that is Lightning Network, so things like Lightning wallets, Lightning merchant applications, and the like to truly take us into that digital hard money Bitcoin standard age. So maybe, you can tell us a little bit about Fulmo and what research you guys do." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "02:27", "start": 147.35, "text": "Right. So So I've been looking into the Lightning Network for, I don't know, two years now, ever since the Lightning Network paper came out, yeah, by, by Poon and Rysia, and Just the beginning of this year, it kind of, for me, made sense to, focus more on the Lightning Network as it seemed to get more, well, not really mainstream ready, but at least, better user friendly, I would say. So, I just thought it would be a good time to jump right into it and saw an opportunity to actually help this whole thing develop and thrive. So not a-- and it's not only about Lightning, but also about giving something back to, to Bitcoin and helping a broader Bitcoin adoption and development. so I founded a company for that, gathered a couple of people to help me, and we were coming to a point where it was like, \"Hm, this is really interesting, but if we're really honest, we don't really know a whole lot about it, and there's probably a lot of other people that feel a similar way.\" So we sat down and thought like, what can we do about this? And it was kind of obvious that we were just gonna do sort of a big meetup, invite a couple of people that could maybe teach us and just see where-- and, and others as well, and just see where we stand, as a community, as a technology. And so we started a Lightning Hack Day. In Berlin specifically because, well, that's just where we're based, which is, I guess, a little coincidental, but, it's always been a Good city to be in for Bitcoin and for crypto, and nowadays I guess they call it blockchain as well. So there's quite a big ecosystem And we had, we already had a lot of early players in the Bitcoin space in Berlin. So for me, it also makes sense to have something like the Lightning Hack Day and Lightning development happening in Berlin at this time. So yeah, that, that- Yeah, so that, that's, that was pretty much the first project we did, the first public project, just the Lightning Hack Day, as sort of an- A mix between an unconference and a hackathon. It's a pretty loose format, so in the beginning I was pretty much just inviting a couple of friends and acquaintances and talking about the Lightning Network. In some seemingly random fashion, which was surprisingly working quite well and also on a pretty high level because we had really interested and interesting participants right from the start." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:19", "start": 319.18, "text": "Yeah, nice. Okay. And with Fulmo, I'm curious, is it, d-does it, does it sell consulting services to businesses or how, how does it, sustain itself from a funding point of view?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "05:32", "start": 331.67, "text": "for now it's mostly bootstrapped. I would say, we're trying to make it a business as well, and that's also one of the reasons we started with the Lightning Hack Day is just to see what business opportunities there are and to reach out to the community, but also more traditional businesses or sort of businesses that are in active in the crypto and Bitcoin field. So we do have like some consulting gigs, mostly for explaining Lightning Network and maybe helping installing some service setup, like Sea Lightning or LND, for example. and just helping people like kind of get a foot into the e-ecosystem or like taking a shortcut in, into understanding Lightning. And that might be Come something, but for now it's pretty experimental and it's not really a big business yet, but we're also still early days. So Pretty much we, we set aside a little money and, we use that money to find out, to sign, to sort of put on some boots, be able to afford some boots and, and walk the way comfortable, comfortably without really knowing where we're headed yet. So it's pretty experimental, and that's why I call it, I, I call it research startup. we, we do have, good people and good knowledge and, a good network by now. It's just not yet totally clear how this is all gonna come together and how this is all gonna make a profitable business." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:13", "start": 433.2, "text": "Okay, yeah, interesting, interesting. Yeah, so who are some of the, Bitcoin and Lightning companies and implementations that you're working with? So you mentioned C-Lightning and LND, so I presume you're working with, Blockstream and with Lightning Labs." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "07:29", "start": 448.95, "text": "Yeah, well We've, by now, pretty much, and so you mean, working with for, for the sort of implementation part or just in general?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:42", "start": 462.22, "text": "Yeah, in both ways, in both ways." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "07:45", "start": 464.62, "text": "Okay. well, the main implementations that are usable right now are pretty much, see Lightning by Blockstream, LND by Lightning Labs, and also Eclair by, Asong from Paris. and we are for now using C-Lightning and LMD. for the consulting side, because it's partly more, more server oriented, is, we've been using C-Lightning. But we also, out of the Lightning hackday came a really good and by now relatively big side project. I can talk about that, a little more in detail later. It's called the Raspberry Blitz, and it's basically a Bitcoin and Lightning network full node running on a Raspberry Pi, and that is using LND by Lightning Labs." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:37", "start": 517.22, "text": "very nice, very nice. Yeah, I think I saw that on the website. That'd be a good one to look into as well. Okay. and who were-- I, I understand you guys have some speakers who come and speak as well. Who are some of the speakers and attendees at the Lightning Hack Days?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "08:52", "start": 531.72, "text": "Yeah, so, following up on, on your previous question, in, in general, we are sort of implementation agnostic. So for the Lightning Hack Day, we tried to offer a platform and try to invite, invite as many people as possible. from as many companies and implementations as possible. So we pretty much talked to all the implementations, and we're really lucky that we can-- we're getting representatives of all the different implementations. So for the next Lightning Hack Day, which is happening on September 1st in Berlin, we have, Christian Decker from Blockstream, Fabrice Durand from Esonc, Bjorn Hals of Lightning Labs, but we also have Kenichi Kurokoto, he's from Japan and working for Neuta, he's actually the CEO. Bitcoin in Utah, which is a different Lightning implementation. And also there's Electrum, which is the Electrum Bitcoin wallet, and they're doing their own Lightning implementation, written in Python. So we pretty much have five Lightning or BOLT compliant implementations coming to Lightning Hack Day. And besides that, we have some other bigger projects that are, that, that have been gaining some traction, like the RGB project by Giacomo Zucco, he's also coming. They are Sort of extending the Lightning Network beyond just, financial transactions and enabling pretty much tokens on the Lightning Network, which people jokingly say, it kind of enables ICOs on the Lightning Network." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:30", "start": 629.75, "text": "very nice. And then you fund yourself, Jeff." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "10:33", "start": 632.95, "text": "Yeah, well, maybe, but I don't really wanna do like, what is it? I try to be, I try to be honest about it, and, I guess we could do some proper marketing and try to sell some shit coins, but I, I still wanna be able to look in the mirror in five years and, not be afraid that some disgruntled investor hits me on the street. So I, I think that's not an avenue for us right now. But even, but still, it's a wise, wise decision. Yeah, yeah. So, so I'm pretty lucky. We're, I mean, we have other people and the concept of the Lightning Hecta itself is that it's not really a conference, so all the speakers I said is because they are sort of high level and they are for now defining the Lightning network. We- We put them on the schedule as proper speakers also for people to have a feeling like about who's coming. But most of the Lightning Hack Day is, is a, designed as a bar camp or an unconference Where all the participants can be speakers as well. So we have a sort of opening session in the morning where everybody gathers and just presents their ideas and what they want to do. And we kind of, create the schedule based on their ideas or what they bring. They want, if, if somebody does, wants to do a demo or workshop or just have an open discussion about a certain issue. all of course relating to the Lightning Network, then we will schedule these sessions, and this is what takes most of the time of the participants and also brings the highest outcome because this is really something, imagine going to university, but instead of just filling Going to a lecture you have to attend, you can actually go to a lecture that is precisely tailored after your specific needs and you can alter it as you go along. so this format has been worked surprisingly well because in the beginning I thought like, \"Is anybody gonna hold a session? Like, aren't people just gonna come and sit here and expect others to talk and just sit there and listen?\" But A lot of the participants are actually pretty proactive and have a, have a lot of interesting projects and, ideas to share. So it's always been a really fun and- Enlightening experience." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:54", "start": 774.23, "text": "Haha, using a little pun there. But with the- Yeah, you got it. So with the- Let's talk a little bit about the attendees at these Lightning Hack Days. maybe tell us a bit about them and what is their background, what sort of technologies do they work with?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "13:14", "start": 793.69, "text": "Okay, for now, I would say Since Lightning Network is in some sort of open, early beta stage, I personally think it's not fit for the mainstream market, the, the mass consumer market. And so we're trying to mostly focus on developers and on an already educated audience, which is, heavy Bitcoin users, Bitcoin evangelists, maximalists, if you will. It's not necessarily limited to Bitcoin, but this is just where most of the Lightning development is happening right now. We also have the Litecoin community is also doing some work for the, Lightning network. So Lightning also works with Litecoin, for example. And I, I would say this is the, second biggest community that's actually looking at the technology right now. So we are expecting An educated audience, it's developers, that are doing Bitcoin development, Bitcoin core development, the Lightning protocol development, but also people who are doing apps, or what you nowadays call Labs, short for Lightning, Lightning Apps or Lightning Applications. there's been some debate around that term, not everybody likes it, and it's not sure if you actually need a term because it pretty much describes an app that has Has some sort of Lightning integration." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "14:42", "start": 881.86, "text": "but in order to, to provide this Lightning integration, there's, yeah, and people can, are coming to, to the Lightning Hack Day to, maybe show what they've been working on And also share their experience and maybe get some new input and try to improve their own Lightning implementation. You have to keep in mind this is really early days, we're building infrastructure right now, so most of the people that are building Labs Also more or less have to build their own, standards, if you will. It's not, not everything comes out of the box right now, you- a lot of the projects that are using Lightning are still pretty, pretty rough on the edges, and you have to do a lot of tinkering and, also issue reporting if you want it to work. So It's not super developer friendly just yet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:44", "start": 943.96, "text": "yeah, but at the same time, it can be really exciting. There's a lot of opportunity. I think, the people who do well at this, at this time, will set themselves up for what is going to, what we believe will be a very big industry in the years to come." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "15:59", "start": 959.39, "text": "Yes, and I totally agree with that. That's why I would say if you, if you want me to find one word for the people attending, I would say it's pioneers. We're gathering the lightning pioneers. At the frontier of Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:14", "start": 973.81, "text": "Yeah, no, that's a good way to put it. So let's now talk about some of the projects that you have seen that have come out of the Lightning Hack Day, or yeah, maybe, you wanna talk about that Raspberry Blitz one that you were discussing earlier. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "16:29", "start": 988.7, "text": "so the word is, \"Raspberry Blitz\" or \"Raspberry Blitz.\" It's based on Raspberry Pi. So \"raspberry pi\" and \"blitz\" is the German word for lightning. It's a small, it's a Raspberry Pi, which has an LCD display Which was designed as a really fast and easy way to set up your own Bitcoin and Lightning network full node." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "16:57", "start": 1017.4, "text": "We wanted to, well, we wanted to enable people to kind of come to the Lightning Hack Day and instantly have a node, and this wasn't really possible before. You had to do some Yeah, well, you have to set up your own node, or you still have to if you start from scratch. And this still takes some time, you have to try out, different implementations, maybe, still get used to the im- to the Lightning implementation. You have to synchronize the Bitcoin blockchain, and this all takes time, so- the idea of the recipe, recipe blitz is, to provide a shortcut and make it as easy as currently possible to have a note Set up and running in the least amount of time possible. so it's also an open source project based on a prior project by Statikus. And what you can do is pretty much just download it and put it on, on your Raspberry Pi and it really helps you set up a node, easily. And we also sell these for the Lightning Hackers just so you have sort of a plug-and-play Full node which you can then use to build Labs with the use of your own Lightning node. yeah, and I hear that they're" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:17", "start": 1096.86, "text": "very cheap to, to produce as well. I saw on your website it says that they're less than one hundred and fifty dollars US." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "18:24", "start": 1104.33, "text": "Yeah, around that. It, it depends on, so we- Part of the recipe blitz is that we provide a shopping list for different countries and it's usually, it's around, it's less than one hundred and fifty dollars usually, depends a little bit on the part prices, but You can actually like just go on the Raspberry Pi Blitz project on GitHub, look at the parts, go to Amazon and order the parts directly. You can of course switch out some parts if you want, but those are the parts that are tested and are working well together. And once they, you've ordered them, you just assemble them at home and put on the, the SD image, and you're pretty much ready to go. And it's pretty well documented by now, and the Raspberry Pi community is also growing, so there's been some issues opened by the community and also some contributions. And yeah, I think it's coming along nicely, and right now the next step would be, the, I mean, we've, we've opened up the recipe blitz also to Litecoin, which has been well received by the Litecoin community. And now we are just gonna put it on different hardware to see, how it works on, for example, the Odroid or the Raspberry Zero. Right now it's based on the Raspberry Three. So it's still expanding, but, but it's, it's pretty cool because you can actually run your own Lightning node with relatively little effort on a dedicated machine that doesn't really do much else. And I, I personally think it's a great project for decentralization as well, to, to enable everybody to run their own full node and yeah, that's a great idea." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:10", "start": 1210.17, "text": "So what, what level of, let's say technicality or level of competence do you think someone would need to be to be able to, you know, order the parts, construct it, and, you know, you-- go through that procedure to, you know, create their own Rusty Blitz?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "20:29", "start": 1228.74, "text": "I think you would still need some, at least some willingness to tinker and be curious and learn. We are still using command line, so it doesn't have a graphical user interface. You should probably be at least comfortable using a terminal," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "20:49", "start": 1249.14, "text": "and, and like enter some commands on your own. You should be comfortable putting together some hardware parts, so I guess if you, if you're, for example, a gamer and you have been building your own PC and putting in some graphic cards yourself, that should be enough knowledge. To be able to assemble the Raspberry Pi and if you can follow instructions and you have an open mind and some basic technical knowledge, it shouldn't be a problem. But it's not a mom-and-pop device yet. It's not something you, you, you take and just plug in your network and it runs. It will require some work and will also, as I said, require some curiosity because It will not always work, you will run into a problem sooner or later, and, at least you need the willingness to tackle the problems, because there's a lot of people help willing to help out and willing to fix the problem that you might encounter. But, Getting that help is also something you need to be able to-- Yeah, you need to be willing to, to get. It's, sure, you get out what you put into it, hey? Exactly, yeah. But it's not, it's not a game where you can just switch it on and it works. That's not the way it works right now. We, we hope, we hope to, achieve that in the long run, and, I think we, it looks like we will eventually get there. but Not so far. I mean, there's to, if you put the focus a little away from just the Lightning Hack and the Raspberry Blitz, there is efforts or at least promises that We will sooner than maybe we expect see some devices that kind of have a running, a running Lightning node on it. I don't know if you followed the news regarding the HTC Exodus? So, what, sorry? The, the, the HTC Exodus. So, it's a phone that's marketed as a blockchain phone by HTC, the, the phone company. And they, and they said they were gonna put a Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Lightning network, as well as a Litecoin Lightning network node on their phone. So there's definitely projects running even publicly, that are trying to enable a consumer-facing Lightning interface or Bitcoin interface to put in the hand, hand of, mass consumer So we might be closer than some people think, but coming back to the Raspberry Pi, we aren't quite there yet. It's gonna take a little more and the software has to be Roughed out and, but we're step by step getting there and it's getting easier and friendlier and, and more and more people will be able to firstly use Lightning Network and develop labs. And at some point, I personally think, at some point you will not, as an end user, need to know that Lightning is running in the background. It will just become part of the Bitcoin standard in, for example, wallets or in your, whatever you-- in Bitcoin infrastructure you're using." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:11", "start": 1450.91, "text": "Yeah, that makes sense to me. What other projects are there that are, that you might wanna-- that you want to highlight that have come out of Lightning Hack Days or out of Fulmo?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "24:23", "start": 1462.72, "text": "we have- I, I could just, try to highlight some, some of the projects that have been at the Lightning Hack Days, and that I've been presenting there and kind of been reshaping and rethinking there. Ideas. a pretty interesting project I personally like is," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "24:44", "start": 1483.62, "text": "I, I think it's called Donner Blitz, and it's a Unity plugin for Lightning, which enables, so Unity, it's the, this- 3D Engine, I believe I, hope I'm not saying anything wrong here right now, but, this, this plugin enables you to, to use Lightning in a 3D environment, for example, for games. Which is pretty cool, I've seen a related demo where you can buy some virtual hats, for example, for, for one Satoshi via Lightning. yeah, very interesting. The-this is, kind of interesting. Let me, let me think what-what else did we have? we had-Yeah, I was" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:32", "start": 1532.07, "text": "having a look on your website, I saw a few. You've got, Sweet Bit and, LN Plays." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "25:38", "start": 1538.09, "text": "Right, so Alan Place presented as well. That was one of the games, w- it was a concept site, I'm not sure if it's still up. But the idea was to play Pokemon online, but instead of just, so it was an emulated, Game Boy, I think, and whenever you wanted your The main character to move, you would have to pay one Satoshi per movement. So you would press on button A, it would give you a Lightning invoice, and you would have, you could pay it, and then the character would move. so this was, yeah, so this" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:16", "start": 1576.18, "text": "is" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "26:16", "start": 1576.26, "text": "like Twitch Plays" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:17", "start": 1577.0, "text": "Pokemon, hey?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "26:18", "start": 1578.22, "text": "Yeah, kind of, kind of. And the sweet bits," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "26:24", "start": 1583.88, "text": "is, there's a lot of names and abbreviations, so I hope I don't mix it up, but this, should be the Bitcoin candy dispenser, as it's also called. That's a pretty cool project that has been showcased at the Lightning Hack Day and that's been in permanent development by one of the participants. So it's pretty much an M&M dispenser that runs on Lightning. It's, online even, you can go to" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "26:51", "start": 1611.0, "text": "Lightning Land, I don't have the, the link on my, on the back of my head, but, it does have a live stream, and you can- Pay a little invoice for fifteen cents and it will dispense some M&Ms and kind of feed the developer, which is kind of a fun idea. So, so people, people usually just go there and, and dump like two or three euros in Bitcoin via Lightning and empty out the machine and it'll just usually show a picture in the livestream of a full plate of M&Ms that like, and the M&Ms are just everywhere and it's a total mess and the machine is empty because people apparently use it. Well, there" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:32", "start": 1652.0, "text": "you go. Okay, so I think the next area that I thought would be a good one to ask about is, what do you see as the challenges lying ahead for the Lightning Network?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "27:45", "start": 1664.78, "text": "So I would say right now we are in a, the Lightning network itself and the basic idea is working and people can use it and people are using it every day. but it's not really, there's still some hook-ups, sorry, some hiccups." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "28:04", "start": 1684.15, "text": "And a lot of improvements are being discussed. Most of them Are geared towards better usability and more practical usability. And for example, one big name that's been floating around is, Atomic Multi-Path," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "28:25", "start": 1704.52, "text": "Now wait. Yeah, you know, APS, yes, Atomic Multi Path," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "28:32", "start": 1712.06, "text": "a propagation which is instead of just using one channel, you split up a payment And routed through different, oh no, I think it's atomic mo- sorry, let, let me just quickly, I think it's atomic multi-path" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:50", "start": 1729.54, "text": "payment. And, yeah, my understanding is that you- Yes. Yes." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "28:52", "start": 1732.5, "text": "Thank you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "28:54", "start": 1733.98, "text": "Yeah, and my understanding is that, instead of simply using one route, you could split the payment up and send it across multiple routes. And the cool part is it's atomic, so it's not that part of the payment would go through and the other part would fail, it either all goes through Or it all fails, so that kind of gives you a bit more certainty. Yes," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "29:13", "start": 1753.48, "text": "so that's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:14", "start": 1753.82, "text": "the idea." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "29:14", "start": 1754.2, "text": "And right now, so it can route your payments over different routes and different nodes and not-- you don't just need one single path for the whole payment, but you can actually split it up. Which is, one hold, one, one thing I would say holding back the practicability of some payments because you always need to have All nodes on the route to be sufficiently funded. Another thing that's in development is, what's called splicing, which pretty much enables Adding additional capacity to a payment channel, and I don't know if we actually said that, but, going back a little bit, the Lightning Network is a network of payment channels. So the, the, the basic piece of the Lightning Network is a payment channel. And you just pretty much connect the different payment channels to each other and add some routing, and then you have the Lightning Network. Just to, to explain that a little bit. So with Placing, you can ex-ten payment channels and, and just Increase or decrease the amount it's able to hold and able to route without closing the payment channel. so let's say it makes it easier sort of a hybrid vision idea to between On and off chain payments. So if you for some reason need to get an on chain payment but you don't want to close your payment channel, you can just move some funds out of the payment channel without closing it, and vice versa, you can also increase your payment channel without Closing it but increasing the capacity. so that's splicing in, there's a couple of different proposals that just make it easier. I think interoperability is still not perfect. I mean, the, the main implementations are all designed to work with each other, so they're bolt compliant according to, to the lightning specifications. But there's still some hiccups that need to be solved And some, some mechanisms that need to be improved in order to, to give the end user a better experience and to make payments even more reliable." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:34", "start": 1893.75, "text": "Yeah, that's true, and I think that's, to be fair, that's true across many, many different aspects of Bitcoin, you know, it's Bitcoin infrastructure, Bitcoin protocol, Lightning protocol, the nodes, you know, you've got, the different types of wallets, you've got desktop wallets, mobile wallets, you know, there's hardware wallets, and then, you, you, you have things like accounting software as well. and all of these other kind of bits and pieces that need to all work together to really make this a cohesive vision. I, I was having a look at some of the hack ideas that you got for the upcoming Lightning Hack Day, and you've got a few there actually. So one, you've-- I saw a few here. One was mobile wallet for the Rust Pipe Blitz, bookkeeping integration, and an NFC and pos, point of sale terminal." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "32:23", "start": 1943.32, "text": "Yes, so those are actually projects, so, yeah, I was talking about how, for example, the Raspberry Pi Blitz is still terminal based, it could be, the idea is that you add sort of an app A satellite app for your phone, so you can just plug in, you can really plug in the USB ports, locally and just sort of set it up using your phone. I think the idea right now is to use Shango Wallet, which enables that or," }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "32:56", "start": 1975.6, "text": "Some of the LND project, I'm not 100% sure which one it is right now, so I don't wanna, tell you something wrong. And for the NFT POS, there's actually a team coming, there's this newly founded startup, and again, there's so many different projects and names that I don't know the name right now, I would have to look it up. But, they're actually working on enabling NFC payments through Lightning. So that's one project that's coming to the Hack Day. And which one was the third one or actually the second one you mentioned? bookkeeping integration. Yes, I mean that's always a, a big thing and an important thing, bookkeeping integration not only for Lightning but for all crypto, it's apparently still a major hurdle for larger companies to, to properly integrate. Crypto payments into their existing systems, into their, into their existing, existing ERP software and, and their bookkeeping software. So I would say this isn't necessarily even lightning specific, but of course, it should work for lightning as well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:07", "start": 2046.56, "text": "Yeah, that's an interesting one, and I think a lot of different, the, the challenge there is also obviously different accounting and taxation rules across different countries, right? So capital gains tax will apply differently. There's all these different complexities to think about with that. So we're kind of a long way off from some of those things. but yeah, so let's, let's talk a little bit about the upcoming Lightning Hack Day. So tell us when is it on and who are some of the speakers, who are coming? I think you mentioned a few." }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "34:35", "start": 2074.51, "text": "Yeah, so it's on September 1st in Berlin, and we also have a hackathon that's one day, that starts a day early on August 31st. And if you come to the city early, you can, we also have like a pre-gathering event on August 30th. So we've pretty much secured or confirmed some of, participants from each major or both compliant Lightning implementation. So the speakers that are confirmed and who will also be mentoring the hackathon are Or part, partially, mentoring the hackathon, Christian Decker, Fabrice from Blockstream, Fabrice Drouin from Esong, Johan Halszczak from Lightning Labs, Kenichi Kuromoto from Neutra, then we have Giacomo Zucco, who was also quite well known as a controversial Bitcoin maximalist, this, but he's pretty active on Twitter, and he as the German saying goes, he doesn't take any prisoners, I would say, at least verbally. So, I'm pretty excited to have him and, and see what he has to say and if he's gonna be as ruth- as ruthless as he sometimes presents himself on Twitter. We do have a Lightning Peach, Pavel Prichotko is gonna speak. Lightning Peach is the Lightning company of the BitFury group, so they are also looking into the Lightning Network and have been contributing some code as well. We have Jonas Nick from Blockstream Who's gonna talk about, Schnorr signatures and Taproot and how this can improve the privacy in Lightning Network. And then we also have some speakers like Stephan Richter and James Chang who are doing, who are gonna to do some introduction, introduction some workshops to introduce the Lightning Network to Lightning beginners. That doesn't mean it's not Bitcoin beginners, you should know your Bitcoin one-on-one before that. But if you're new to Lightning and you want to know what it's all about and how, let's say, HTLCs work, all that, then James and Stephan are gonna teach that. It's actually a pretty cool concept because Stephan does this kind of, street theater. So he's using real people to concept- Actualize transactions and signatures, and it's kind of fun. I've, I've, we've done it a couple times already, and it's really fun to watch, and it's been pretty much fun for the attendees because it gets really interactive, and I think it's a different approach to understand Lightning, but it's also a good one to teach people about it. So yeah, those are sort of the official ones, and we have a bunch of other companies that have Confirmed their attendance and also, what's, what might be important to say that the Lightning Hack Day is a community event, so even though I'm I'm personally doing it full time right now, we're not making any money on that and we are relying on sponsors. So for now, we've already secured, two sponsors who are, well, pretty much paying for everything but also putting a lot of effort, to make it become a reality, signing over their developers and also helping with marketing, so we have Exchange Union who's been doing a really good job, and we also have Chip, Shift Crypto Security who's doing the, BitBox hardware wallet. And they're also gonna be there and bring a couple of bit boxes, and so you can take them apart and see if you want to do something lightning related with those. And as I mentioned earlier, most of the fun actually happens in the barcamp sessions, so Even if people come for the speakers, for which are really some of the, the best, well, some of the people that are actually defining Lightning right now The Buckham, Buckham sessions really, really hold a lot of surprises, and it's always kind of hard to teaser that because I don't know what's gonna happen yet. We don't have those scheduled, we don't have any, any talks that are prepared and that are, that are getting signed off by me, but I just tell people, please come there, if you want to prepare something, prepare something and just present it at the beginning of the day. And So it's kind of like a big bag of interesting surprises, if you will." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:02", "start": 2341.93, "text": "Yeah, no, that sounds really excellent. I think, it's really a good thing you're doing here to help, build, build on top of build lightning, applications and, you know, hardware devices, because all of these things are gonna be needed over the next five, ten, fifteen years. Yeah, so I think with that said, I think that, that's, they're the key questions I had for you. did you have any final comments that you wanted to make? I suppose if someone wants to come to the Lightning Hack Day, what should they do? Where should they come and find you?" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "39:32", "start": 2371.96, "text": "if they want to come to Lightning, to the Lightning Hack Day, which would be a really good idea, otherwise you're gonna miss a chance to meet so many great people working on the Lightning network, just go to lightninghackday.fulmo.org, that's f u l m o dot org. And register. The idea of the Lightning Hack Day is that, it's free, but we've kind of added a little real life spam filter to keep all the people out that just would come for the free pizza but not really contribute to the event. So" }, { "speaker": "jeff_gallas_of_fulmo", "time": "40:05", "start": 2405.38, "text": "we have like Lightning PayPal tickets for five euros, which is more symbolic, and if you really can't afford that, you can also write me an email and I'll send you a voucher. So I'm not expecting people to pay just to put in a little effort and, and like think about why they wanna come. And what they can contribute. But really, anybody's welcome, and we're really happy to, to welcome a lot of international guests. I would say at least fifty percent of our guests are flying in from a different country, so it's We're really happy to have this, this sort of global footprint already. And yeah, that sounds excellent. I, I always like to see Lightning as One of the next digital frontiers, and we're all working together in this as, as pioneers and fellow bolters, working on this, on this rocket going, going up. At an incredible speed and incredible speed of innovation, and it's just really cool to meet so many interesting and also diverse people that are working with the same goal in mind and with this common goal and this focus and this Also, quality and dedication, it always just blows my mind, and this is really what keeps me going." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:21", "start": 2480.92, "text": "Yeah, that's excellent. I can really see that, you can really see the passion coming through in what you're saying and what you're doing. So, guys, my guest today is Jeff Gallas of Fulmo, and you can find him on Twitter at Fulmo Lightning, and check out the Fulmo website, Fulmo dot org. Okay, excellent. So I'll put all the links in the show notes page. but yeah, thanks for coming on the show today, Thank you so much for having me. It was a great pleasure. Okay, guys, that was my conversation with Jeff. You can find the show notes on my site stephanlivera dot com, just search s l p fourteen, and as usual, just, give me so, give me a, a share on your social media, and lastly, just come and find me on Twitter at stephanlivera. Thanks very much, guys, and I'll speak to you next time." } ] }