{ "episodeId": "SLP254", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "dario_sneidermanis": { "name": "Dario Sneidermanis", "role": "guest", "tag": "DARIO" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 9.31, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today, for episode two hundred and fifty-four, we're talking about a new wallet, Muun. Wallet. And so Dario, the founder, joins me, and they've got a really interesting advanced technological approach with a few key differences in terms of the typical wallets that you might be used to, but we talk about some of that in this episode, which I'm sure you'll enjoy. This show brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, the fastest way from zero to Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been significantly de-risked over the past year. At this point, everyone should probably own at least a little. 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The anti-cloud mining option, Compass helps you buy your own ASIC and secure hosting at great facilities around the world. For years, we have all heard that mining is only profitable if you're investing tons of money, but now with Compass, everyone is able to tap into economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap industrial power rates. And if you're unsure about how to get started with mining Bitcoin. Compu offers hardware and hosting bundles which eliminates the need for advanced technical knowledge and allows you to quickly get started mining Bitcoin with hardware you own. Visit them at mine with compass dot com and start mining Bitcoin today. Here's my interview with Dario. Dario, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "03:07", "start": 187.15, "text": "Thank you, I'm glad to be here. Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:11", "start": 190.79, "text": "So, Dario, I see you and the team at Muun Wallet have been doing some interesting things, but first, let's hear about you. How did you get into Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "03:21", "start": 200.64, "text": "so I first heard about Bitcoin, around 2011, a friend of mine, linked me to the paper. I read it, and it, it, like, I, I, I remember thinking, \"Well, this might be possible,\" and so, but like, I, I didn't get into it that much after, after reading the paper. And then in 2013, with some friends in college, we started playing a- A little bit, further with Bitcoin, it was the first, Latin American Bitcoin conference, and so a lot of people all from all over the world came here, and I, first, talked with, Andreas and, and, and, I remember, like, his, awesome speeches about Bitcoin and, and being really inspired about it, and starting to think about, How can, like, this is a really awesome technology, how can we get it to the point, where anyone can use it, right? Because, at, at that point it was super difficult, it was really difficult to buy bitcoins, to use them safely, to not lose it. and yeah, so, so, playing a little bit over the years and then in, around two thousand fourteen with, with these same friends from college, we got together, we were talking about, payment channels, which were a really new concept at the time, and we were thinking, \"What can we do with payment channels?\" and after thinking about it for a bit, we got together to, to, we did kind of a hackathon over a weekend and, did a demo of using, Payment channels, oh, to, to stream video peer to peer, and we called it Streamium and launched it, and, and it, it, we had a lot of really good feedback, a-and, and yeah, a-after a, a little bit of, a little bit of time after that, I, I started working at Muun, and, and actually saying like, \"Hey, how can we make this accessible to everyone?\" And so I've been at it for, for, some years now. And yeah, that, that's how I got into All the recent developments, I, I, I think we are finally starting to see, this vision that, that was probably somewhat clear, back then, but a lot of engineering work had to be done to actually get here to start seeing like instant payments, super cheap payments and that kind of stuff, in, in the last couple months, I, I think we've seen a lot of adoption in the Lightning space, so it's really awesome that it's actually happening." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:08", "start": 368.01, "text": "And tell us how you got more involved in Lightning and a bit of your history around Lightning Network." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "06:14", "start": 374.14, "text": "Yeah, so I've been following Lightning for quite a while, as I said, we were playing with payment channels really early on. And I, I remember, I think it was, mid two thousand and seventeen, I got together with, the people at Lightning Labs, a-and asked them like about the timings, when is this going to be ready? And what, what are the fees going to be? It, it was really unclear at the time how it could all like fit together. And so after that talk, I, I got back, to Argentina and started working on thinking about how can- Can we ship this in a mobile device? And, and one of the, the biggest problems at the time, or, or things that weren't clear were the, how the fees w-were going to work and how rebalancing was going to work. And so, I hired a friend that was, doing his PhD in mathematics, and, and so we got into building like a, a lightning network simulator because at the time there was no network, to try to understand how, how it was going to- Going to, to fit together. and after a while, we started actually, building, Lightning into the wallet. it was a long road, but yeah, so, so I think from early on, we detected that two of the biggest technical problems in Bitcoin, were that for some kind of payment, Bitcoin is really slow, and for some kind of payments, Bitcoin can be super expensive, especially as time goes on and fees go up. And so, Lightning was like the perfect solution It complements perfectly with on-chain payments, and so, it was clear that the solution to making accessible payments in Bitcoin, was via Lightning Network, but there was a lot of uncertainty as to how that was going to actually work. So we've been thinking about it for quite a while now, and yeah, so, we-- after a lot of work, we finally got to what's Moon today, which I think is a really nice- Demo of what Lightning can be. There's still a lot of work to be done, there's a, a lot of work ahead, and so, so I, I wouldn't call it, a final solution, but I, I, I think it's, we, we got a lot of positive feedback about the architecture and the UX we managed to get to, so, so we'll keep improving in that front." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:46", "start": 526.07, "text": "Cool. And I'd also like to talk about the relevance of Bitcoin in the Argentina Bitcoin scene and The impact of fees, 'cause I'm sure, the fees rising in the Bitcoin world, and, you know, o-- during Bitcoin's bull runs, typically everything is indexed with number go up. So fees is, fees is going up, and so on. Could you perhaps put that into context for us? How important is it that fees are kept cheap for people who need to do, let's say, peer-to-peer transactions or, you know, day-to-day spending, using Bitcoin and Lightning?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "09:18", "start": 558.07, "text": "Yeah, definitely. So here in Argentina, there are a couple of things really interesting going So on the one hand, there, there's a lot of people get-getting in, into Bitcoin right now. I, I think it's, it's happening everywhere, but, but in Argentina especially, it's really easy for Argentinians to understand the value of noncustodial because we've all seen it fail. Like almost every living Argentinian has seen the banks fail, and, and not being able to access your own money. The noncustodial pitch, is really easy to grasp. And on the other hand, we are They are super used to thinking in multiple currencies, having currencies, super volatile currencies, and so Bitcoin isn't that weird, i-it's not that different to, to other things, and I think that, that makes like the perfect recipe for, for Bitcoin adoption. And yeah, so, so a lot of, another interesting thing that's happening here is that a lot of, on-ramps to Bitcoin are mostly peer-to-peer, few people use exchanges, because most of the economy, Outside of banks, is, mostly a cash economy. And so when you are buying Bitcoin in a peer-to-peer manner, on the one hand, amounts maybe aren't so high, a-and on the other hand, it's, it's really important how you handle fees, because in other places, maybe that, that there's good exchange infrastructure, people are, are leaving the, the money inside the exchanges to not pay the withdrawal fees, but since, here a lot, a lot of- If it is being done peer to peer, you have to pay the withdrawal fees. and so the, the, the rise of on-chain fees ha-has hit really hard the, the local Bitcoin community, I think. and so there's a lot of features that are really important, for the Argentinian users, such as, really good on-chain fee estimation and being able to, to, maybe if I trust the other person, I don't need to confirm it right now, and so- It's really important to be able to confirm, to, to set the, the fees so that they, they don't need to confirm right now and, and pay cheaper fees. And on the other hand, something really interesting that we've been seeing, after the release of Muun two point oh is that since using Lightning right now is, is so easy and i-it's kind of a no-brainer if I'm going to do like a peer-to-peer transaction to try to use Lightning. And so we are su-suddenly seeing, some payments that, that we didn't- Before, such as, like Lightning payments in the order of thousand dollars, two thousand dollars, three thou- thousand dollars, which wasn't something that we were counting on. So we are rushing right now to, to actually, have a good UX and, and, support really well high amount Lightning payments. but yeah, I, I, I think that, maybe when you are buying a hundred dollars worth of Bitcoin, having to pay maybe five, ten dollars of- Fund chain fees makes it, it, it, it, people stop using Bitcoin, right? Yeah. When, when it's so high. So, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:30", "start": 749.58, "text": "Dario, one other point I wanted to touch on there, because I'm just thinking of this in my head as well, when people do peer-to-peer cash trades, often when they are doing it on chain, someone has to sit there and wait for a confirmation, but in a high fee environment, that means you're either-- Well, it might be a double whammy where you have to pay a high fee and still wait, minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, and in this time, you're going to have to sit with that person and wait for the confirmation. But now, in a Lightning world, that's changed, right?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "13:02", "start": 781.8, "text": "Yeah, definitely. It's, it's a completely different world, and, and it, it makes a lot of sense to use Lightning in that way, because you get this thing where you just get together, exchange the cash, send the money, and, and you're off. so UX-wise, it's, it's completely changed. And so, I I think there's a lot of possibilities there, and, and, and even with, with the few exchanges that are starting to, to integrate with Lightning, the experience of, selling Bitcoin is completely changed because right now you, you don't-- now you don't have to wait, for three confirmations to get your money in, and so I, I think that will allow, f-for the exchanges that go all the way down that, that wa- that, path. It's really interesting because they may be able, for example, to, to give you a quote of, the rate you are going to use to, to sell your bitcoins even before you send them, which isn't possible right now due to the confirmations. And so I think that one of the most interesting things, of Lightning right now, when you look at the UX, a-a-and how users are using it, is the fact that the payments are instant, and that changes a lot of things. Small- Small things, but once you, you take them to their logical conclusion, I, I think we're going to see, much nicer, non-custodial experiences all over the ecosystem." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:34", "start": 873.66, "text": "Fantastic. So let's talk about Muun Wallet then. Can you give us an overview, what is it and what, what's the approach that you have taken with it?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "14:42", "start": 881.86, "text": "Yeah. So, Our objective with Muun is to take non-- make non-custodianship so easy to use that everyone can use it. Bitcoin still has a long way to go there. It's not-- we're not expecting to, to, to get to, to that point, like in a year or so. It's going to take a lot of time. Bitcoin is, is, is a long-term project, right? But, there's a lot of things that can be done today, to improve the UX, to, to make it really easy" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "15:14", "start": 914.12, "text": "to send and receive payments without thinking about, about a lot of things and to not lose your money, which is, I think, recovery i-is one of the biggest pain points today, for mainstream users when using non-custodial, and for us, it's, it's a really important project because, I think that we are now seeing a lot of mainstream users, get into Bitcoin, and if we don't make non-custodial really, really easy to use, then- Then they will just drop it and they will use custodial services, and I think it's, it's something that we can't afford to lose, and so we're working on that, and the idea is, yeah, make, make, make these, all these sophisticated technologies that have been, that the entire ecosystem has been developi-developing for several years, like, like multi-sig security, Lightning Network, custom fees, and all that stuff, work Work together in an easy to use way. And so for a user that doesn't care much about the details, that's fine, and they can use it without understanding every single piece of technology. And on the other hand, for, for someone that wants to, to actually understand it and, and play with it, we also give them that possibility. So in a sense, we have like two different audiences, the, the Bitcoin early adopters and the Bitcoin mainstream users that are getting into the co- the ecosystem right now. And I think it's really important to, to, pay attention to both audiences, and, and I do believe it's possible to, to build a product for both audiences, especially because mainstream users, are really looking for someone to help them get into Bitcoin, and so they go ask, the, the person that they know, is, is a like, is the most into Bitcoin, and so we want not only to, to help this mainstream user get into- Bitcoin, but also the early adopter, make it really easy for them to onboard other, other people, which is something that we see a lot, right? So, so as Bitcoiners really like to, to get other people into Bitcoin, and it's a lot of responsibility. It's, super common to be afraid, about whether they are going to lose their bitcoins. We see some people do crazy stuff to avoid, like having, for example, their family lose their bitcoins, and so- I think not only the experience of using Bitcoin, but also the experience of recommending Bitcoin can be improved quite a lot." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:50", "start": 1070.09, "text": "Yeah, you made a lot of great points there. so I think now would be a good time to talk a little bit about the technological approach taken with Muun. So I was reading your blog post and it seems you've taken a very technology forward approach and some things are slightly different, and so I thought that was why it would make a really great episode for the listeners. So can you tell us a little bit about the Muun approach from a technology point of view? Perhaps, perhaps we could start with the, fee estimation part." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "18:17", "start": 1097.35, "text": "Yeah, sure. So, we remember from the last couple, bull markets that, when the Bitcoin price goes up, fees go up, and that compounds, right? Because, fees are, are quoted in Bitcoin, and so it gets super expensive to use Bitcoin, and people just stop using it. And so it, it was really important for us to, to tackle that, and, and we always faith- Felt as users that, we could do a better job than, than the, wallet estimators, and, and it was really weird because the, like, the standard answer to that was, \"Well, no, you see, the, the Bitcoin mar-- fee market is quite complex and it's real time, so it's really difficult to predict, how the fee is going to work.\" And so, for quite a while, we, we just settled with that explanation, and at one point, we decided to actually- Go there and make some tests a-and figure out if, if that was actually true. can estimation be better than, what every wallet is doing, which is mostly what Bitcoin D is doing? And to our surprise, it turned out that, you can do much, much better than, than Bitcoin D if you use the mempool data. And so we got down to, design an, an estimator, that we could train with, historical, mempool data and And it worked really well, it worked actually much better than, than we expected, which is actually what users were feeling, what we were feeling as users when using Bitcoin, right? We, we, we were like, in the middle of a weekend, we knew that, Bitcoin fees were really slow, w-were really low. you go into, mempool space and check the fees and, and are, you are doing like manually the work that the, the wallet, could be doing, and so- So there was a big opportunity there, and so we worked for, for the last year, on an estimator that, that could do like at least a better job than, than what users were doing manually. And yeah, so, so, that's, in production right now, it's working really, really well. We found a, a couple ways to optimize it a little bit to guarantee, for example, that, that it's always going to be at least as expensive as Bitcoin D or lower. And so we, we get all the non-guastodianship guarantees of Bitcoin's fee estimator. And so there, there's a li- a lot of interesting details that, that you can adjust, once you have that. But in retrospect, I, I think right now that we, we could prove that this actually worked. it makes a lot of sense, to design estimators that are paying attention to what's happening in real time in the mempool, which is super important in high fee markets because they are super volatile. And so you have to adjust rapidly, to, to the changes in the mempool." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:18", "start": 1278.11, "text": "Yeah, really interesting. So if I had to just summarize that for any listeners who are a little bit newer, think of it like when you send your Bitcoin transaction, your wallet has to essentially pick a fee, but it doesn't-- we don't know because what you-- what could happen is that it might try to pick a fee that it thinks will get into the next block or maybe into a, you know, one of the later blocks, but then things can change really quickly because a lot of other hit inside the mempool waiting to be mined into a transaction, and then you might be, you might be left in the lurch or you're kind of now you got pushed back in the queue, and that's sort of why, the fee conversation, i-is a little bit difficult, but at the same time, that's also why if you're doing small value transactions, that's where Lightning is a lot more useful. yeah, definitely. So, Dario, I know with Muun Wallet, you're trying to take a different approach around things, like you're Your blog posts and material, you're taking a bit of a forward approach. You're trying to use output descriptors and miniscript and some of these more advanced technical components to that, as opposed to doing the typical, you know, BIP thirty-nine twelve-word seed. So can you maybe tell us a little bit about why you're taking this different approach? What, what's different instead of doing the typical twelve-word backup?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "22:37", "start": 1356.8, "text": "Sure. So we had this problem really early on because we decided to go with a multi-sig approach to the wallet. We wanted to provide, a hot wallet that has better security as possible. And so what we do is, Muun is a two of two multisig. This means that there, there's one key on the phone and there's another on our servers, and so every transaction must be cosigned by, by, by both keys. And so that allows us to, for example, may-- allow users to maybe, tell us that they- They, they, they lost their phone, and so we stopped, signing transactions from the old phone, until they, they logged into another one. And so, a, a lot of cool things, can be done once, once you are in the multisig world. But then, like nothing in the ecosystem is prepared to handle that, right? Because the mnemonics, the, the, the twelve words are just a private key. and so if you have more than one private key, then you can handle mnemonics, you can I can have multi-sig with mnemonics, and then actually historically there were a lot of problems with mnemonics, because they were missing a lot of metadata. And so, it's, it, it was really common to, for example, have this, backup of mnemonics that I had, I used in a wallet like four years ago, and now I want to, to recover the money, and I input those, those words into a new wallet, and it can't find any money. So it's, A really tense moment, as a user, and you have to start trying with different wallet, trying to remember what wallet you were using, and so I believe the, the mnemonic, solution had several problems for a while, but they weren't big enough problems to actually make us as an ecosystem move forward onto other, more comprehensive solutions. But, then came multisig, which for many years it was there in the protocol, but no one was using it that much. And multisig had, had this problem that you need multiple keys, and so mnemonics don't work anymore, and you need some- Nothing else. And I, I, I think that the guys at, at WalkStream, saw this problem a couple years ago, which prompted them to, to start working on a solution to how can you recover your money, from a complex multisig setup. And so they ended up creating the output descriptors, which are, which are this new technology that allows you to express an arbitrary script, an arbitrary set of keys, how they are being used used to create outputs, and then you can use that to recover your money. And right now, I think Bitcoin D has almost complete support for output descriptors, so you can import an arbitrary output descriptor and it will find your money wh-wherever it is, and let you move it to wherever you want to, to move it. And so Taproot was kind of this turning point where if you wanted to do Taproot, then you ha-- you had to do something different, and that got us thinking about how can we provide A, a really easy to use, recovery system that doesn't depend on Muun, so i-i-it needs to work even if Muun disappears. And no, the descriptors were the perfect solution for that, and so, but nobody was using them, and it wasn't clear from a UX, standpoint how exactly they fit in, in the model, in the wallet model. And so we had to, to try a lot, iterate a lot, try different solutions, and we got to, to this A solution that we call an emergency kit, which is a PDF file, that has all the information you need to recover your money whenever you want to. It has the output de-descriptors, it has, both private keys, but all the sensible data, and also it has instructions on how to use it, right? Because mnemonics are, are great, but if you don't know exactly what they are, it's really hard to, to figure it out by yourself. And so I think this is one of the, the points where you have to take care Of both your audiences, both, the people that are really understand what they are doing and the people that don't have, a pretty good idea of what's happening behind the scenes, but you want to help them anyway. And so, yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:09", "start": 1628.55, "text": "Yeah. So I think one point I might just clarify, just because that, there was a lot there, just for listeners who aren't as technical, let me just try to give you, a layman's explanation. So historically, people were using twelve-word backup, you know, BIP thirty-nine. Standard or other standards, and because it would rely on using a set, you know, pathway and a set kind of way of doing things. But the reality is that over time, different wallets are using different things, so that introduces this problem of trying to then recover. And how do you then go and like, do you try to recover by trying to brute force all the different wallet parameters? And that's where, you know, sites like walletsrecovery dot org will list out the pathways and all the different details. And for example, Luke Childs on an earlier episode, episode two Hundred and six, we spoke about how he built that kind of feature into Electrum to try to recover and help people deal with that thing. But I think what you're getting at here, Dario, is that we wanna try to take a technological approach and try to move into this world where we are using some of the more advanced features, such as output descriptors, which is available and working in the recent versions of Bitcoin Core. And so we can think of it, I guess, maybe let me just put it in simple terms for people who aren't as technical. You can think of it like you have Keys, but you might not know where to find the money, and it's kind-- it can, like, after enough time, it might be a little bit like a needle in a haystack problem. And so what you're doing is with these new-- back with this new style of backups, is that you're kind of saying, \"Here's the private key, and here's the map to go and find where that money is so that you haven't lost it,\" correct?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "28:44", "start": 1723.77, "text": "Yeah, definitely. That's a great explanation. yeah, I, I, I think that so, so I said like we, we went like as an ecosystem through three different stages, when we, when we were in the single sig world where, a wallet was just a, a, a single private key, then mnemonics were good enough. They had these problems where you had to deal, with finding, how do you find the, the, where your money is, but you could kinda brute force it a-and find it. And Then we started trying to, we moved to the second phase where we started to get like a little bit, more secure setups, and for that you need multisig, and then for multisig, then it's much harder, and mnemonics fall short, and so we need a new solution. And, and now we're moving to a third phase where we have Lightning Network, which is a completely different beast. It's, it's, recovery is much harder if you want to guarantee, the non-freasability aspect of your money, which is how do I move my money without any collaboration from any server? It's a little bit harder, and then you, you have to use all these new technology together, right? It's, you need Alpaca scripters, you need Miniscript, PSBTs, and so I think that In the last couple of years, the ecosystem has been creating all these different pieces, of technology to solve these new problems, which is, it's really great, but we haven't seen, many wallets up until now try to use them, actually use them to solve problems for the user without the user needing to understand everything that's, that's in there. And so- What's going on" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:30", "start": 1829.73, "text": "in the background? Yeah." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "30:30", "start": 1830.39, "text": "Yeah. And, and that's been- Our main focus, we want to use all this technology to solve the new problems that we're having that allows us to, to use really cool tech, and so we, we can have a, a really good security on a mobile phone, we can have, Lightning Network, non-custodial Lightning Network together with your on-chain wallet, and so it's the, the end product, I think it, and the end experience, I, I think it's really cool, but you need to figure out how all these pieces fit together." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:01", "start": 1860.79, "text": "Right. And I guess let me just underscore one thing One other benefit, so as you're saying, this is a two of two multi-signature, so I think just to underscore that for listeners, that means typically if you're using most phone wallets, the keys are hot on that device, but now if we're doing two of two multi-sig, now there is a trade-off, right? We're using multi-sig that costs a little bit more in terms of on-chain fee than, say, single signature, but you are getting a security benefit and maybe there's a little bit more of a complexity, but now if somebody hacks your phone, they won" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:33", "start": 1893.02, "text": "Two of two and Moon's servers have the second key, so can you explain a little bit about how that works?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "31:38", "start": 1898.42, "text": "Yeah, sure. So when you set up your phone, like, the, the two keys are created, one is in the phone and one is created in the server. The second key never goes to the, to the phone, so, so you have this guarantee where in order to get your money, an attacker would need to, in some way, get both keys or get one key and, and fool the server into signing another- transaction, so it, it's much more difficult. Our approach here has been how many things have to go wrong in order for an attacker to get your money. And so we have all the, the usual protections and, and we try to be super careful about how we handle the key in the phone, but in the end, even if they get the, the key in the phone, then they just got one of the two keys. And so that gives a, a, an extra layer of security, for using a mobile, a mo- a, a wallet in a mobile device. And at the same time, your emergency kit, which is, these, these PDF where you ha- you have all your recovery information, has, has both keys. And so you don't, like, if you, if Moon disappears and the servers are completely destroyed and, and so you can't recover your money via the application You will always have all the information you need, all the keys you need to move your money independently from Moon, and so you get the best of both worlds, where you have this complete autonomy if you wanted to, but that's a little bit uncomfortable to use for day-to-day transactions. And for day-to-day transactions, you have a, a, a really good UX with the best security you can get on a mobile device. Yeah, that, that's gotcha." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:25", "start": 2004.88, "text": "And, and so the backups part, can you tell us? A little bit how that works, because, going through the app, it says, it seems there's an email and a password part, and then there's also a code. So can you just outline what are, what is that?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "33:36", "start": 2016.41, "text": "Yeah, sure. So, so all those pieces are actually sol- we see them as solving two different problems. one of the problems is how do I get access to my wallet if, for example, I'm changing phones or, or I lost my, my previous phone. And another problem that we're treating kinda separately is how do we get access to the If Moon disappears, right? Which, which gives the non-custodianship guarantee. And so that second part, the non-custodial recovery, is composed of two different pieces of information. You have your recovery code, which is, something that you write down on a piece of paper. It's pretty similar to what an xPub is. And then you have the emergency kit, which is this PDF file, which has all the information and the-- and it has the private keys, but the private keys are encrypted with your recovery code. So you need both pieces of data to be able to move your money. By doing so, by, by separating these two pieces of information, i-instead of putting them all together in just a mnemonic, we, we solve a lot of problems because you can have multiple copies of the emergency key, you can have it, you can store it in the cloud, and that's safe and private, you, you don't have any risk of doing so. So we want to make it so that it's really, really difficult to lose At the same time, since the recovery code, which is this code written on a, on a piece of paper, is, it's not enough to move your money by itself, then you are protected from, examp-- for example, from someone finding your mnemonics and just like taking your money, which is the regular setup for wallets today. And so, we get quite a bit, better security against digital attackers and also against physical attackers who just get your- Get your, get your mnemonic. It's a little bit more complex, but we worked, we worked really hard to, to make it as simple as possible. And so, once you, you set up your wallet, we try to guide you through all these steps so that you, when, when you end, you are completely, you're, you are in the best possible state with regards to, non-custodianship, how to get your money back, and how to, you, recover your money in case you lose your phone. And then there's this, first part where, we try to do this, maybe this flow to recover your money that may be more familiar for non-- like, maybe beginners, where you can either, use your recovery code as, as in every wallet, you use the, the piece, the piece of data you wrote on a paper to get access to your money. You can choose to do that, or you can choose to do a more traditional approach where you- Put your email, we send you an email, to your phone. You, you click on the email, verifying that it's actually you. you can use either the code or a password to gain access to your wallet, which we found is easier, for new users to grasp and understand what's going on and gives them a couple of, of choices as to how they, how to get their money back in case, for example, they forgot their password or, or something like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:56", "start": 2216.12, "text": "Gotcha. So just to clarify Clarify there. You have the option there to take, it's kind of like having an encrypted cloud backup, and then you're writing down in essence the password to unlock that encrypted cloud backup, and that way there's not a single point of failure. You, you need one, you need both pieces to be able to get the money basically. So then what's-- could you just outline for me the difference there between the email backup and the password for that versus the kind of overall password in that next step? What, what's the difference there or are they the same?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "37:28", "start": 2247.72, "text": "Yeah, sure. So what we're doing in, in the background is, we store an, a backup of your private key, the private key that, that lives on, on your phone, encrypted with your password and your recovery code. And so as a user, you can treat it, if you want to, as a regular application, w-well, you, you, you log in with your email, and once the server, verifies that it's really you, by, by clicking the email, like- A magic link or something like that, then you will be able to, like, if you input your password, and the server will, will send a challenge to your phone to verify that you actually, know what the password is, without revealing it to the server. We have a little bit of crypto there to do that. And once the server verifies that you own the-- you know the actual password, then it will send the backup of your private key encrypted with the password and claim Inside it will be decrypted, and all your wallet state will be restored. And so we started with that setup, and we found that, it's, it's really, really common to forget your password, like everyone forgets their password. And so we started creating extra layers of options there. And so if you forget your password, then you can do the same but with your recovery code, which is the code you wrote on a paper, and it, it works in, in, in a similar way. where there, there's a backup of your private key encrypted with your recovery code. Once you, you show the server that you actually know what the recovery code is, the, the server will send the encrypted backup to be decrypted client side. And yeah, so, so that's- I'd say the, the recovery options that have-- you can do them using just the app, they are really easy to use, and, and it gives a, a good recovery experience. And then you have this second mechanism, which, was the one I, I, I was telling you about before, which is the, the non-re-- non-custodial mechanism." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:36", "start": 2375.96, "text": "Back to the show in a moment after a message for the sponsors. Ciphersafe dot io are producing metal backup seed products. So if you have got a hardware wallet and you've written down those 12 words on that piece of paper, well now you need to start thinking about making sure it is fireproof and waterproof and rustproof and petproof and tamper evident. So the cipher wheel is a stainless steel product coming in a wheel shape where you get some tiles and you can slide those tiles in and you do four tiles. Per word from your seed, and it also has a padlock tamper-evident seal, so you can know if your seed has been opened. This also helps with recovery, so you can make sure that you or your loved ones have access to your bitcoins if an accident occurs. Go and order yours at cyphersafe dot io and use the code livera for a discount. Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a global Bitcoin-backed lending platform, so you can lend and borrow anonymously on your own terms. This is a peer-to-peer lending solution with a Unique multi-signature escrow for each deal, so you can grow your savings and earn returns on your investment. So if you have stablecoins lying around like USDT, you can create an offer and earn interest by lending. On the other hand, if you have Bitcoin and you need some liquidity and you don't wanna sell, well, you can borrow stablecoins. So with this lend platform, you set your own terms, you put up the offers depending on how long you want to borrow or lend and the interest rate. Go to lend dot hodlholdl dot com and finally coinkite dot com. They are the creators of my favorite Bitcoin hardware wallet, the Coldcard. This is one of the most recommended hardware wallets by Bitcoiners, and it has a range of features and security aspects to it, such as the ability to use it completely airgapped. You can actually, literally, never plug it into a computer. You can just plug it to the wall, and you can use an SD card or a micro SD card rather to shuttle that wallet over and use wallets like Specter Desktop or Electrum or BlueWallet. I've long been a fan of this wallet. It allows a lot of security at such Last point, and there's so many awesome features like PSBT, you can use it as part of a multisig setup, it has an address explorer. Go and check them out, go to coinkite dot com and use the code livera for a discount. Back to the interview. Yeah. And so that backup then, how did we deal then, and I guess we'll get into the Lightning stuff as well, but that backup, does that also recover whatever was in the Lightning channels as well?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "42:01", "start": 2520.92, "text": "Yeah. So, so all your wallet state is backed up in the server, encrypted with your key. So once you, you recovered your key, you can download all your encrypted backup, decrypt, decrypt it locally, and in some way recreate, your wallet state as if you, you have- I'd always been using it in that same phone. Gotcha. so yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:25", "start": 2544.92, "text": "Cool. And that can be quite handy, I guess, because there are people all around the world, and I, I presume then this kind of wallet might make a lot of sense for people who are more in the developing world and they're not using the typical sort of hardware wallets and everything else, they might just have a phone wallet, and this could be the kind of one easy wallet that they use." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "42:42", "start": 2562.03, "text": "Yeah, definitely. I, I think it doesn't replace the need for hardware wallets, i-if you want to hold a lot of money, you will like, we, we still, of course, recommend to use hardware wallets. a-and eventually it'd be nice to, to, to have a, a, a nice integration with hardware wallets. I think the guys at Casa, for example, are doing a great job there, m-making it r-accessible to, to use like really cool, secure setups with hardware wallets in an accessible manner But you, like most people, that we talk with, have a-at least a little bit of money at hand, a little bit of bitcoins, if they, if they want to use it somewhere. And then for the people that are just getting into Bitcoin, that maybe don't have yet enough knowledge to use a hardware wallet successfully, I think it's a, it's a like having a mobile wallet is a really good way to, to onboard these people. Let them have their first Bitcoin experience, later on moving to a hardware wallet. And so, right now we, we are working on like figuring out, the thing is, this is hard, but figuring out at, at what point we want to, start suggesting users to maybe move some of the money to a hardware wallet or a more secure setup. So I think it's, we want to help users all the way, even if, this, the best solution isn't, isn't to store their money in Muun." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:12", "start": 2652.45, "text": "Right, yeah, yeah, certainly, and I think, it, it makes a lot of sense for people to try this one as a first wallet even, just for a total newbie starting to learn, and then because it's already got Bitcoin and Lightning, you can alleviate some of that fee concern as well. So let's get into the Lightning stuff. So it's interesting you've got one unified balance, there's no sort of separate Bitcoin and Lightning. Can you tell us a little bit for the listeners who want to understand what's going on under the hood, how does that work?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "44:40", "start": 2680.15, "text": "Yeah We started with that vision, for us, and, we thought a lot about how we're going, the Lightning Network, h-how is it going to interact, with on-chain payments? And so we figured ear-early on that on-chain payments aren't going away anytime soon, because actually, i-in Lightning, when you do the math, you end up, seeing that as time goes on, the fees tend to be proportional to the amounts, and so i-if you- let's say, I don't know, point five, we may see one, once everything settles down, and, and it, it gets a little bit more stable, we may see, proportional fees in the Lightning Network, and so that's like, I don't know, maybe point five percent, fees, to say something. and so that's, that makes it, makes it so that Lightning is, really good, for small amount payments, but once you get to, to really big amounts, then- On chain is much better, because fees are much smaller and they, they don't scale with the amount you're sending and, and maybe if you're sending one million dollars, then Lightning will probably never work for that or will be super expensive. And so we wanted to, to provide a really unified experience and as time goes on and, and, and the ecosystems starts adopting Lightning more and more, users will be able to, to do, to perform Lightning payments Without having to take a decision previously about how, what amount of money they want to use for Lightning and what amount of money they want to use for on-chain. And, and so we set to do that and we started, experimenting early on with summering swaps based on the, on the work that Alex Bosworth had been doing. it was, it, it was really inspiring for us, to, to, to see that summering swaps worked really well. They had some problems, but overall- World, they were a, a, a great solution if you wanted to provide a unified balance for on-chain and off-chain and at the same time don't break the non-custodianship guarantees. It was like a, a-- and it provided us a, a path to, to doing full lightning while maintaining the non-custodianship guarantees in an incremental way, right? So we started with summering swaps and we started, making them better and better and better, and, and now we are moving towards- so we started with a default on-chain mechanism, and now we're moving towards a default off-chain mechanism. And so this is, I think there are three interesting ideas that we're using in order to, to manage that level of UX. On the one hand, we are using, we are starting to use something that we call non-interactive channels, which is the idea that you can't-- you can receive an on-chain payment, and that same payment will open a channel between you and Muun. And so So you don't have to pay any, any fees in order to, to ha-- to get your money on chain once you receive on chain. and, and that allows us to, to mix that part of the on-chain world with, with the off-chain setup. And then on the other hand, you need to be able, like, if you have your money on channels, you need to be able to, to make on-chain payments. There's an old idea to do that that's called splice outs, and splice outs are this idea where if you have already- All your money in payment channels, then you can close your channels, make an unchain transaction and reopen channels with, with your change. You can do all those, operations in the same transaction. And so it's, it's kind of an atomic operation You can get to a really, really good UX because now between non-interactive channels and splices out, you can receive and send on-chain payments while having all your money in channels all the time, and I think that's a really-- that provides a way to, to have a really good UX. it's super hard to do, right? So, so we've been building this, for a couple years now, and we still have at least a year ahead of us, to make everything work. right now our- Channels are really basic because we wanted to nail all these points before getting to the full payment channels, and so right now the payment channels are single use, they don't have revocations, so they aren't super efficient. The next step will be to, to add full revocation to the channels and have like full off-chain payments and, and have all these, really cool things of super low fees of using Lightning. And yeah, so, so that, that's our basic architecture. It's- It's quite complex, as you can see, but I think after working on it for, for, for a bit, I think, it's-- we got it to a point, where now we feel it's, it's been actually worth it to go that way, and we can do that. It was really important for us to not compromise either on the UX or the non-custodianship of on-chain payments while doing so. So we maybe, maybe we took a, the long road to get in here compared to other wallets. Wallets, and so for a while, we didn't have a really good Lightning UX, but I think now we got to the point where it's, it's good enough and, and you can have this really nice onboarding experience and you can have this, really integrating Lightning and on-chain experience, so, so I, I think it was w-worth it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:20", "start": 3019.85, "text": "Right, I see. And so basically the wallet does everything in Lightning, and then the idea is when it needs to make an on-chain payment, it will- We'll do a swap out using like a submarine swap style. Is that, have I understood you correctly there?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "50:34", "start": 3034.1, "text": "we're actually right now, about to, to, to release, a version where we don't use, swaps anymore. We actually do these splice outs, which are these like channel break and reopen operations, which are much more efficient, but, yeah, they, they are way harder to, to, to code, so it took us a while. But yeah, so, so you could receive directly On a channel and send money on chain by breaking a channel, closing a channel, sending the payment and reopening a channel with a change output. So it's, it actually on chain when you see it, it looks just like a regular on chain transaction. And now that we, it appears that we'll have Taproot in a few months, it will look like a, a regular on chain transaction. There, there will be, no difference from doing like regular payments. I, I, I think one of the cool things that I re- I really like about this approach is that since each time you receive an on-chain payment that UTXO opens a payment channel, then you, you kinda like the, the old problem, of on-chain wallets, of UTXO selection, and dealing with UTXOs, now becomes the channel selection problem, and you have to deal with channels, which is a, a little bit of a different problem that has different trade-offs. Actually, you need to kinda- Kind of rethink what a wallet is from the ground up once you want to support Lightning, like a, a unified Lightning experience." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:06", "start": 3126.18, "text": "Yeah, certainly a very interesting exper- a very interesting, technological approach and a little different from the other wallets that I've seen to date. so is it using LND in the background or what's going on there?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "52:20", "start": 3140.14, "text": "So, we use, LNDs for our node in, in the server, but for the channels between the server and the users' phones, a completely different, stack, where we had, it, it was so custom that we had to, to build it ourselves. And actually, there, there's a lot of parts that you don't need if you, want to solve that problem specifically. we are using, for example, you don't need all the routing stuff, because we're doing something- It's similar to, to trampoline payments, and, and, and so, the routing is right now outs-outsourced to, outsourced to the server. LND solved that problem for us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:02", "start": 3181.94, "text": "Gotcha. so, I guess, yeah, so there'll be a few, I guess it's like the privacy question around that, but, also, I guess before we get there, I also wanted to talk a little bit about how you're doing, with the channels, like, is the wallet already using things like MPP or things like that in the background?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "53:21", "start": 3200.78, "text": "not right now. So we don't support MPP right now, we're working on it. W-we do support it for sending, but, but not for receiving. It, it wasn't, super easy to implement with our current infrastructure, but we're building all the parts to make it possible. And so I guess we'll soon, have MPP, but not sure exactly when right now." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:45", "start": 3225.24, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And also just, I guess the trade-offs around the, turbo channels. Component. So I saw there was a blog post about that. Has that changed since then or is that still the case? Can you outline a little bit about what that is and how you're using that?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "53:58", "start": 3237.63, "text": "Yeah, definitely. so there's this, really hard problem in the Lightning Network, which is the, the inbound capacity problem. And for end users, this means that how do I receive Lightning payments if I don't have enough inbound capacity? If no one has opened a channel previously with me and- Has locked their money in order to make it possible that I can receive enough funds and be a lightning. And so what we saw in, in, in the last couple of years from different wallets and different experiments is that, a lot of people are tending towards using turbo channels, which are a cool way of saying like zero confirmation channels. So, so someone opens a channel, towards you in, on the spot, like on once you want to receive some money if you don't have enough Inbound capacity, someone can open a channel on the spot, with you and route the payment that you are receiving through that channel. And then you have, like a-as, as a user, you have the possibility of choosing to either trust your counterparty to not make a double spend off the channel, or you can just wait until you are super sure that the channel is fully open and then accept the payment. And so we wanted to give users the possibility of choosing whether they- They, they prefer the, the full security or the full, like UX, nice UX of having instant payments. And so, we took the maybe not so common approach of, of, leaving this, this decision to the user. And so in, in Muun settings, you can choose whether you're okay trusting two-way channels or if you want to turn them off and just each time you receive a payment, when you don't have enough inbound capacity, then you will just wait, for a full- Confirmation and then accept the payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:53", "start": 3352.83, "text": "Yeah. So I guess just for clarity then, that means if a new user sets up Moon Wallet and they want to fund it, can they fund that either with an on-chain transaction or with a Lightning, or do they have to fund it with an on-chain transaction first?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "56:08", "start": 3367.8, "text": "They can do, they, they can receive, from any network, so, so the idea is that, we wanted to make it so that, users, stopped thinking about whether they have on-chain or off-chain balance, they just have one balance and they can, at any time, they can either receive a Lightning payment or, or an on-chain payment and they can make a Lightning payment or an on-chain payment, and that works like, i-i-all the combinations work. You can install Moon and receive via Lightning or receive via on-chain and then immediately after make either a Lightning payment or an on-chain payment and that will work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:50", "start": 3410.06, "text": "That's very clever, I like that, and, I think that might make a lot of sense for, people in the developing world who really, they can appreciate having super low fees for small value transactions, because otherwise, I mean, I've seen cases where people in the developing world will try to withdraw from an exchange and then see that all their, all, like, you know, s-- or some huge percentage of the amount they're withdrawing gets basically eaten up in Bitcoin fee, right?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "57:16", "start": 3436.42, "text": "Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's really hard and, and also like e-even if, if you are okay with that fee, then, they, they, they now want to use the Lightning Network, and if they find that they have to pay like a huge fee to open a channel, and they have to wait for some confirmation, it's, it's really hard to grasp, for, for maybe for someone that's not so technical, and even if, if you understand everything that's going on, the UX is, is kinda hard, so it's, it's- It's, really useful to have all that abstracted away and not have to think about it, and it just works." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:56", "start": 3476.48, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's really, fascinating approach. so I guess the other part is around the privacy angle. So I guess this is probably one area where we're having to make a trade-off here that, you know, the user is making off a trade-off there for it, for use, for, for having non-custodial, having easy UX, maybe it's some bit of a, some amount of a privacy trade-off," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:20", "start": 3499.7, "text": "Into Bitcoin and Lightning, right?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "58:22", "start": 3501.96, "text": "Yeah, so, we started with a very, like, Moon 1.0 was a very non-private wallet, and since then we learned, like, like, we learned a lot, about- Why it was important and, and how to achieve, the UX we were trying to do without, compromising privacy. And so we've been moving, towards being more and more private, as we, as we've iterated, and I think we still have a lot, a lot of way to go, but we are finding that, little by little we can, provide this level of UX, with, with Better and better, privacy guarantees. And for example, the guys at, at, at Phoenix are doing, a really good work, with, trampoline payments, which are, like they allow you to make lightning payments, without having to, to, to make all the routing decisions on your phone while preserving a lot of, the privacy guarantees. and so we're, we're implementing that Right now, and, and I, I think it's really cool. I, I, for, in order to be really private, you need, a lot of adoption of trampoline payments, throughout the entire Lightning ecosystem, which, I guess it will take some time, but I think they, they are a great trade-off, right? Because, running, running a node on your phone, is hard. So, so i-if we can find a way to do it, in a way that actually works, it's, it's efficient enough to, to run on a phone that's maybe most of them i-it's not connected to the internet, and at the same time provide really good fees and really good privacy. I, I, I think that's, where, not, not only us, but, but Entire, noncustodial wallet ecosystem, in Lightning wants to go towards and, and, and I think it's, it's going to be possible. We are all working towards that direction. There's still a lot of, improvements to do and, and, and things to do to, to actually get there, but we'll get there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:36", "start": 3636.92, "text": "Yeah, yeah, certainly, I think this makes a lot of sense for those kinds of users who are totally new and just need an easy way to get started, and they don't wanna have to think about lightning and channels and blah, blah, blah. They just wanna, you know, pay Bitcoin and receive Bitcoin. so in terms of, receiving Bitcoin, so let's say they wanna do a lightning, receive, they would have to go into the receive and then type in an invoice amount basically, and then they can receive on that, or how, how, how's that part" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:01:06", "start": 3666.9, "text": "So right now, you, we are using, amount-less invoices, this means that, you, you just use a QR in the same way that you would do, with on-chain payments. but, we're-- right now we are adding the possibility to, to add an amount to your invoice because many services, that already support Lightning, they only support invoices with amounts, and so we are adding the possibility in the same way, as, as with, on-chain payments, you can use a regular QR code that doesn't have any amount, but optionally you can add an amount a-and, and be explicit about that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:01:49", "start": 3709.86, "text": "Gotcha. And I, as I understand, there were some people who raised a security concern around that. I know the Zap team, and I think they didn't like the idea of amountless invoices because one of the intermediary hops can steal some of the funds. But then I also understand that there's a, I think with, if you do And you can do it in a more safe way. So what's your thought there?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:02:10", "start": 3730.08, "text": "Yeah, so it, it, it used to be unsafe, but, since then, like from maybe, half a year ago, i-it's already, like, a solution has already been, been devised to, to solve this security problem, which actually, i-i-it involves, adding, an extra secret to the invoice, which was, necessary in order to provide, in order to, to- Perform NPP payments, they had the same problem, like how do you know that you already received, all the parts that compose, a payment? and so, right now, i-i-it's not unsafe anymore. the, the problem has been completely solved. but I, I guess, not everyone either knows about this or, or has implemented, the support for, for payment se- Secrets, but I guess we'll, we'll see the, the, the ecosystem, transition to, to, to using more payment secrets because, everyone wants MPP, and so, I, I, I, I think, this is just a transitional per-period where some people don't support them, but, but yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:28", "start": 3808.57, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think, so it's probably just a factor of sometimes some, it depends what wallet you're sending from because if that wallet doesn't support sending into that kind, then, then you get this kind of-- and really, it's just an initial teething problem, because we anticipate, you know, in a few months, whatever, like basically all the wallets will have it, and then it won't be an issue." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:03:49", "start": 3829.25, "text": "Exactly. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:50", "start": 3830.87, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:03:52", "start": 3832.21, "text": "and I think it's, it's really important, we, we put a lot of thought about how to make the Lightning experience as similar as possible to the on-chain experience, and users are really used to, to, using QRs without an amount, so it was important for us to figure out how to provide that same experience and maybe make the amounts optional in the same way as for on-chain payments." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:16", "start": 3856.75, "text": "Yeah. and one other thing I'm thinking of is people- People maybe from the older days are more used to this idea, and maybe this is more in an asynchronous way. So as an example, people can just put up a Bitcoin address and-- or that maybe they're operating, they're doing some kind of online trade or, you know, peer-to-peer, but online, not in person, and they might say, \"I'll pay me into this address.\" And then, I guess now with Lightning, it's the online requirement. So how, how do you have any ideas or what's, what's the approach with Muun Wallet on, on that? Like Have sent somebody a Lightning invoice and you've closed, or you've, you know, switched to another app on your phone, will Moon still be able to take the payment, or do, do you have to keep Moon open while you are expecting a payment?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:05:03", "start": 3903.86, "text": "So we'll try as hard as possible to wake up your device, a-and sign, accept the payment in the background. Most of the time it works, and when it doesn't, you will receive a, a, a like a push notification, a, a, a UI notification, Asking you to open the app. Hopefully, i-it isn't happening, i-i-it isn't that common. And most of the time, the, the operate, the, the mobile operating system is okay with waking the application, having them, accept the payment in the background. But you can always be offline, right? So, some Lightning payments might, might take a while if the receiving phone is turned off or is offline. you might need to, to wait until It, it, it's turned on, but in practice, it isn't. W-we aren't seeing, that situation that often. We'll see how, how it progresses, as, as people start using Lightning more and more, so i-it'll be interesting to see. but yeah, so, so one of the, for example, one of the requests, we recently had, from several people is to, to, we were using a one hour expiration. for our invoices, our, our lining invoices, and that was okay if you wanted to, to pay, via lining, to receive a, a lining payment, face to face, but if you wanted to do maybe a more asynchronous flow where you, maybe I, I send you, an invoice via some chat application and you're in a different time zone and maybe you'll see it eight hours later, then you might want to, to set The expiration of your invoice is, longer in the future, and so we are working on allowing that, a-a-and in those asynchronous flows, it's much more, probable that, that you m-maybe, your phone is off, you're sleeping, your phone is off line or something like that, and so, we really had to handle, the fact that even though most of the time Lightning payments are instant, they might not be so If, if the other phone, isn't, isn't connected to the internet, so in, in that way, we handle them, in a similar manner to on-chain payments where you, you just have your, your, your payment is pending until, the other phone wakes up." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:38", "start": 4058.82, "text": "I" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:07:38", "start": 4058.9, "text": "see," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:07:39", "start": 4059.28, "text": "yeah, yeah, that's really interesting stuff, and I think, it's a very, interesting, I guess, technological approach here. So with, I guess the other question is just around sustainability of the wallet, like what's kind of the model going forward and like whether the model, like the wallet, I guess, how, how is it being funded such that it is sustainable into the future?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:07:59", "start": 4079.61, "text": "Sure. so, so our idea is to, to start at some point in the future, allowing users to, to both, buy and sell bitcoins in-app, not by ourselves, because we want to, to, to, we want to keep being non-custodial and we want to not- Anything about our users, so we wouldn't be okay with doing some KYC stuff, with our servers, but I think we can, we can maybe provide, a, a nice, on ramp and off ramp experience inside the app by working with other exchanges. And so, our monetization strategy goes, towards that way, where we want to, to be part of, of, the flow of buying and selling. in Bitcoin, especially for newcomers, and, and the idea would be to, to make Moon a, a single stop solution for onboarding people to Bitcoin, where you just have to download Moon and then you can, buy your bit-- your first bitcoins, you can store them there in a secure manner, non-custodially, you can send them, receive them, and eventually sell them if you want to. so yeah, we're building, we're- Building up, until we get to the point where we can provide a, a, an even better experience of buying bitcoins and holding them in an unconsensual mat- in an unconsensual manner, in a better way than, than consensually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:09:33", "start": 4173.45, "text": "Fantastic. And, Dario, also just wanted to get a sense from you, what's the Argentina Bitcoin scene looking like? Are, is, are you seeing a lot of people getting into Bitcoin? Are they, you know, getting into Lightning? What's the, what's the- What's the, what's the feel from the ground?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:09:49", "start": 4189.6, "text": "so it's, it's, it's really crazy right now, there's a lot of people getting into Bitcoin, everyone is talking about Bitcoin, like, every friend from school, e-every p-person I know has pinged me in the last, in the last month or so, asking about Bitcoin, a-a-and i-it's really common to, to just, hearing people, in the street talking about Bitcoin and crypto in general. so I, I think, it's really interesting what's happening for, for the general population, for the mainstream, users. everyone is, is interested, about it and talking about it. there's a huge, community, that, that, that's been, in here from, from really early on, in Argentina. It, it, there's a lot of, people working in order to receive new people a-and explain to them, what Bitcoin is a-and, and the right ways to use Bitcoin. So, so it's really welcoming for new- Newcomers, there's a huge, Facebook group, that I don't know, there's like, five, ten thousand people, getting into the group every week, right now, and yeah, so I, I, I think it's It's really interesting what's happening here. I think Bitcoin has the, has the potential to solve, problems like real problems right now for people that don't even care about Bitcoin. it's, for example, it's really hard in Argentina to move money in or out of the country. It's really hard to, to buy US dollars, and so people are left with the fact that, they have to- Either, save, have their savings in, in Argentinian pesos or, or, or, or look for other solutions. And so I think Bitcoin, i-i-is, a really interesting way out. The, the usability i-is getting better and better. There's a lot of exchanges, here in Argentina, it's grown like crazy. I don't know, there's fifteen exchanges right now or something like that. and it's growing quite a bit. so yeah, I, I, I'm really excited about what I'm seeing, like I didn't expect to see this level of, of, adoption for quite a while, so it's happening really fast. and we'll see where it goes, but, there's, there's a tremendous opportunity for Bitcoin to, to be more than, an investment or, or, like," }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:12:50", "start": 4370.21, "text": "I, I, I think like I, I always think that, Bitcoin will have succeeded once, users are using it without even knowing that Bitcoin is in the background, and I think we're getting faster and faster to that point. so, I think it's awesome." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:13:05", "start": 4385.66, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool to see. So I guess when I'm thinking about Muun Wallet, I'm just, I'm sort of thinking how slick it is in terms of having a unified balance. Do you see Muun as like a wallet that kind of work- Like really especially well for people in, more like a developing world, or do you see it kind of just like it's, it's operating like really, like even people in the Western world would really, get a lot of benefit from using this, wouldn't you think?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:13:30", "start": 4410.37, "text": "yeah, definitely. So, so we're building, we are trying to build globally from the get-go, and, and, it's, really interesting because, you have like, a, a huge set of challenges, once you, you Really good experience, for, for everyone, at least in the Western world, but, so a while ago we, did an experiment, in a slam here in Argentina to, to actually understand how, how well suited is Bitcoin today, to solve, m-maybe to, to, to follow this, narrative of, banking the unbanked and, and actually helping, people that- Aren't that integrated into, into the, the regular system, banking system, and, and the rest of the institutions. And so what we found at that point was that, Bitcoin still has a really long way to go to get there. th-these people maybe didn't have a phone or, or didn't have internet or had, internet but with really, really bad connectivity and, and maybe they weren't that- That educated, in, in the how the digital world, works, and we were using a lot of, analogies, like digital analogies, u-UX analogies that they didn't understand. and so I think, b-both, Bitcoin and, and the bigger, tech industry has a lot to learn in order to, to solve the, the- Solve problems for the people that maybe are most in need of it, and we're working towards that way. I, I think the entire ecosystem is working towards, towards that, but we still have a long way to go. it's, there, there, there are some basic requirements today, for using Bitcoin, like having, a, a good internet connection, having a smartphone, being like somewhat used to, to, what a, an a- Mobile application is, and so there's a lot of education work to be done there, but I, I, I think Bitcoin will get there. it's, I, I think it can solve real problem, for, for people that are most in need of them, which is half, half of the world's population, right? So, so it's a huge opportunity, for, for everyone, and we'll eventually get there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:16:15", "start": 4575.14, "text": "Cool. look, Dario, I think it's probably a good point to- Finish up here. So, where can listeners find you online?" }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:16:21", "start": 4581.95, "text": "Yeah, so I'm on Twitter, at E S I N E D E R, and, yeah, and you can, look me up there or, or via email, via Signal, and yeah, I, I, I'm super happy always to, to talk with, people that may have, ideas or- Questions about, where the Bitcoin ecosystem is going and, and what's actually, possible to be done in, in the next couple of years. So feel free to reach me and I'd be happy to talk." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:01", "start": 4621.15, "text": "Excellent. Well, yeah, thanks very much for the work you're doing, making, Bitcoin and Lightning very accessible. I think listeners should, go and check out the Muun wallet and, thank you, Dario, for joining me." }, { "speaker": "dario_sneidermanis", "time": "01:17:11", "start": 4631.53, "text": "Yeah, thank you for having me. It was, it was really nice." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:17:14", "start": 4634.91, "text": "So I hope you found that an interesting discussion around wallet backups and wallet architecture. What do you think in terms of using output descriptors? And do you think it makes sense for a newcomer to be using Moon Wallet, given that it has Bitcoin and Lightning all in one with no real distinction between the two? Give them a try and let me know what you think. You can find the show notes for this episode at stephanlivera.com/254 and make sure you're telling your friends and family about my show. This is obviously A time where there's a lot of new people coming into the space, so make sure you're giving them the guidance to go and learn from the show also. Thanks, and I'll see you guys in the Citadel." } ] }