{ "episodeId": "SLP407", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "ben_arc": { "name": "Ben Arc", "role": "guest", "tag": "BEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:09", "start": 8.53, "text": "Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin, and Swan is organizing an all new West Coast event, deeply dedicated to Bitcoin and Bitcoiners. I'll be one of the hosts. Join us November 10th and 11th for Pacific Bitcoin. This is a two-day experience filled with all kinds of Bitcoiners, education- Workshops and just an amazing experience. There'll be a main stage with panels and fireside chats as you're used to, there'll be a swan dome with deep dive sessions, there'll be a Bitcoin lab, a place for you to get in person support, there'll be places to lounge and hang out, play hoops, a retro gaming zone, and parties lining up in the days leading up to the event. So you don't wanna miss this one, come to LA, California in November and be part of this Pacific Bitcoin experience. If you've got friends or family who are pre-coiners or new Opportunity to bring them along so they can soak up the Bitcoin culture also. So if you wanna get your tickets, go to pacificbitcoin dot com and of course, use the code Livera to get a discount on your tickets. Are you a Bitcoin builder or looking to be a Bitcoin merchant? Well, you might wanna think about using Voltage because they can help you with running your Bitcoin node, Lightning node, or BTC Pay server node. This allows you to operate your own merchant payment processing solution, and Voltage can help you do this really easily. So now, if you're a builder, you can Scale nodes instantly by the thousands. You don't have to think so hard about how you need to integrate Lightning, it doesn't have to be an afterthought. Voltage can make this hassle-free for you, whether you are an individual or an organization to integrate and build on top of Lightning. You can get quality liquidity inbound to your node easily and so much more. This used to be a real headache for people, but Voltage is simplifying this, so you can go and get your node up and running in two minutes by visiting voltage dot cloud. Mempool dot space is the Bitcoin explorer built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners, it features real-time transaction tracking and mempool visualization so you can quickly get the information you need about your Bitcoin transactions. It's available over Tor and also completely open source, so you can even run your own mempool explorer at home on a Raspberry Pi with just one click. Over one million people use mempool dot space every month, and the project is operated freely for the benefit of the Bitcoin community without ads or third-party trackers of any kind. Go try it out today over at mempool dot space. So for this show, episode four hundred and seven, I'm speaking with Ben Arc. He is a Bitcoin hardware maker and also the founder of the LNbits project. So we chat about his experience getting into Bitcoin hardware hacking and making, as well as how the LNbits project came about. Now, this might be really useful for you because it has all these really useful extensions. It's got a POS function, you can sell event tickets, you can run Satoshi Dice, you can use it for Lightning payment splitting, it has automated loopout, there's all kinds of things we'll get into in this episode. Episode, which I'm sure you'll learn a lot from. Ben, welcome to the show." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "03:04", "start": 184.32, "text": "Hello, man. Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:07", "start": 186.54, "text": "Yeah, of course. I, have been watching your work for a while. I'm interested to chat with you. I know we obviously will have our disagreements on the, political and economic aspects of it, but I think in terms of what you're building with LNbits and what you're doing in terms of hardware hacking and software around the community, I'm definitely a fan. So, interested to chat with you and chat" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:30", "start": 210.0, "text": "Also a chance to hear from your perspective, like what is this project and some of the stuff you're building. So, do you wanna just give us a bit of a background on yourself in terms of like all the hardware hacking and software and stuff that you're working on with Bitcoin?" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "03:42", "start": 221.54, "text": "Yeah, there seemed to be, when I started actively developing things and trying to make things and contribute back into the Bitcoin ecosystem, there seemed to be a lack of a kind of maker space in Bitcoin. People were experimenting with Raspberry Pis and putting full nodes in Raspberry Pis, but they weren't using microcontrollers. For smaller devices. So I went to one of the Lightning, the first Lightning Hack Day by Fullmo, when the Lightning network had more or less just launched, and there was a great project there which was a sweet machine, had a Full node in it, and there was a QR code, and if you scanned the QR code, it would take you to a website where you could select an amount, some sweets, and then it would pay the invoice, and then it would spit the sweets out of the, out of the sweet machine. At that point, there was still this kind of idea that with We kind of started to realize that obviously if you have an on-chain transaction for opening channels, it all becomes quite expensive, and that's probably not the-- if you've got sweet machines or, or arcade machines or, you know, secondary devices, it makes more sense to have just a microcontroller in there which can just request an invoice from a node, display the invoice, check to see if it's been paid, and then turn whatever on, whether it be the sweet machine or the arcade machine to activate a credit or something. So that was something I, I realized I could-- I didn't have the At that period, I was a teacher, and I, I taught some electronics with my kids, where I used to teach. So I had like a very rudimentary understanding of electronics, and I'd played around with a little bit with some Arduino-type devices. So I did a little bit of research, found a great little microcontroller, the SP32, and then thought, okay, so I'm gonna do a bunch of projects and just base them off this microcontroller, keep it as simple as possible. And the first thing which I tried to create was the, the sweet machine. And at that point" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "05:30", "start": 330.0, "text": "Check to see if the invoice's been paid, and then it could turn on the relay and then spell the sweets. Then from there, I realized that I could plug in a keypad into the, the microcontroller, and then I could input an amount and request an invoice, and there we go, it's like, okay, there's a point of sale, great, cool. So that was like the first sort of point of sale I made. I really liked these little e-paper screens as well at that point. But then there was a couple of hang-ups. It was like, well," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "05:56", "start": 356.43, "text": "I" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "06:00", "start": 359.94, "text": "Particularly actively developing for a technology, you start, you know, you might hit some roadblocks, and then you can be more or less guaranteed other people are gonna hit those roadblocks. So after the point of sale, a project I was working on was an ATM, and the ATM needs the ability to be able to spend my funds, 'cause it's gonna pay someone out some money. And at that point, nodes and even custodial services like OpenNode or LNP or, and, and nodes like L-LND and C-Lightning, you couldn't have multiple accounts, you had which meant that if you had any service or hardware which was paying out funds, it would effectively have your admin key. So if someone could get the admin key, they could steal your money. So I wanted a way of being able to split up and, my funds into lots of little accounts which would all have their own API keys. So that was another thing which, which was needed. And then also a problem which, which, which, which I was having was every project I'd make, I'd have to make like six different versions of the project, 'cause I, I wanted people" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "07:00", "start": 419.96, "text": "People who just wanted to use a custodial service to be able to use it. So, and they all have different APIs, so I'd have to have like an LND version of the POS, a Lightning version of the POS, clever version of the POS. So it made sense to have a middleware piece of software where I could connect to funding sources and then just reuse that piece of software and it would just have a standard API, then I could just develop my point of sale for that standard API, and it wouldn't matter what the funding source was underneath. So that was another pain point which I This was all taking ages, by the way, 'cause it was, I was learning on the job, and I, you know, I hadn't programmed really before." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:35", "start": 455.28, "text": "Right. And this is over the process of, of years, right? Because you would-- I mean, if we're talking Lightning Hack Day, that was what, twenty eighteen? or there were multiple Hack Days, to be clear. Yeah. Yeah. But some of those early ones, there were-- and I know the German Lightning community is quite a strong scene, and so they had a lot of Lightning Hack Days, and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:58", "start": 477.87, "text": "I Being participating in things like, or leading a workshop on, say, a hack table where you're teaching people, okay, here's how you use these different pieces of commodity hardware to create some kind of Bitcoin project or a Lightning project. And so I think it's really fascinating to see the evolution of that over time, and now we're coming to, now, you know, this LNbits. So for, for listeners just to understand, so maybe they're not as familiar, like, what is LNbits?" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "08:26", "start": 505.55, "text": "Well, so, so, so I was, I was very slowly leading up to the, the to exist. So the, and it will all make sense, it's not just me ranting about hardware, but the one of the points of sale in Berlin and Rome, and it's a, a very good point actually that without the Lightning Hack Days, none of this stuff would exist, and without the, just the support and the, the access to great minds, people like, you know, Stephan Livera, of, of Specter Wallet, he was really helpful. Yeah. Yeah. Every time I'd see him at a conference, I'd have a bunch That, you know, they were able to make such huge impact on, on the stuff I was building. So how, am I able to kind of encourage people to also, as soon as you teach people how to actually actively build on, on these little hardware devices, they start making cool things, you know, they start making hardware wallets and points of sale and everything. Anyway, so we had one of these points of sale, and it was, M5 Stack actually, which was one of these, this was like an off-the-shelf product by," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "09:24", "start": 563.99, "text": "this company called M5, but That's the owner. one of his issues was he didn't know what payments going into his node were for drinks and what, where were the payments, and he's a cypherpunk, old school cypherpunk, pre Bitcoin, you know, cryptoanarchist cypherpunk, but he was like, \"I have to pay taxes,\" so he needed like an export to CSV feature as well, you know, in his, to connect it somehow to this little point of sale that connects to this middleware, w-where I also wanted different accounts. So then all of Pay, and we exchanged a lot of great ideas, and I, I, I, it just all came together to be this, this start, this sort of free and open source custodial thing. And then there's this other idea of, if you want to attack regulation, one of the best ways to do it is make running things easier, you know? So it's like when the, the original Siphir punks were attacking, attacking some of the crypto regulation at that time, they just made running that software easier for people, and then more people could run it, and it made more If you could run like a piece of software and you could be, you know, the Uncle, Uncle Jim model for your friend's family or whatever, or the whole world, if it made it easy for you to run your own little open node, would that be more effective at kind of, you know, attacking or, or making it easier to bypass regu-regulations when it comes to running, you know, money transfer or custodial services? So that was another, another idea. So anyways, it all came together, and then, and then I think Christian Rousso was actually overseeing of, of I write it in PHP and he was like, \"No.\" And I said, \"If I make it, can I, can we get it on the Raspiblitz?\" And, and he was like, \"Yeah, but you, you can't make it in PHP if you want it on the Raspiblitz, I'm afraid.\" So, \"How about Python?\" So I'm like, \"Okay, Python.\" So I'm like, \"I'm looking at Python APIs,\" and I find Flask, which is a really small, API back-end API. And then I For this middle layer soft-software, which is great. And then I had a little tab in there for called Extensions, which, you know, so the other idea was, you know, a lot of us actively developing and tinkering around with this new software, we would make these little projects, like I made like the first Alenurao, withdraw faucet, you know, on, online, the Sinclair faucet, and that was very popular. People wanted me to open source it, but it was just trash in the back. And every time someone would build one of these little projects, they would So it also made sense as a development tool in the stack, you could include this thing in, and it would take all that heavy lifting out, and you could just build those little slivers of functionality. And actually, why not have those slivers of functionality in the software itself as extensions, kind of like a WordPress type thing where you can extend it in a direction which is relevant to your node in a direction, which is relevant to you. So that project, was clunky, and I think I put a bounty out to have it," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "12:28", "start": 747.53, "text": "just sort of aud Contact about that. and then when they started working, this is why I love bounties, 'cause when, when you put out a bounty, someone'll be like, \"Oh, great, you know, I get to work on some software with relates to Bitcoin and, you know, I get to help build something cool and I get paid as well.\" And then once that's happened, they're then, they know the software and they think of things which they wanna build themselves on the software and they were just like, stuck to it then, like, you know, like, so So yeah, so they, and then came a big refactor, headed by Alira, where we switched to Quasar, the frontend Quasar, which is a very nice, if you wanna develop a piece of software, it's a very nice way to make a soft- piece of software look nice. It's like a, a, a CSS view, library which you can use, framework. and then, then it looked good, it looked legit, and it'd also been refactored, and it worked pretty well, but it couldn't do sort of backend so we could like have extensions, like listening for when invoices are being paid and then get it to do a thing. And it's, it's great, and it, it, as a tool built for my own needs, I just, I use it, you know, if I'm building like, a point of sale, I'll use LNbits 'cause it's easier. And, I think a lot of other people, when you build something for yourself, there's always a lot of other people out there who are also like you, a-and because of that, we In, you start in the LNbits journey, they'll have a few questions, and the same people will answer the same questions again and again and again, and they don't care that they-- again, it's the idea of encouraging, people to experiment with the software, experiment with the project, and it just has-- you, you see that with all the successful free and open source projects, you can have like the, the greatest free and open source software out there, but if you're kind of mean, toxic, like no one's gonna, and then standoffish with people" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "14:27", "start": 866.99, "text": "when they So projects like the BTC Pay Server projects, they do very well, because, you just get, you know, all this support, the supportive network for, future users. Yeah, that's excellent. Yeah. Then those users then go on to become supportive themselves of, of other people too. They have to pass the baton on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:46", "start": 885.56, "text": "Yeah, that's fantastic. I think it's a really cool tool. I, I was playing around with it, so I guess let me just rewind just to make sure listeners are all following along, not everyone's like into the technical" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "15:00", "start": 899.87, "text": "Account system which includes extensions, so you can extend your node in any direction. So you can install it on your node, it's kind of like WordPress for your node. You have a simple wallet account system where you can have multiple accounts, multiple wallets, multiple users, so you can be your uncle Jim, you know, custodian for friends family, but we also have these extensions where you can make use of other people's work and you can extend that node in any direction which is relevant to you. So if you're a content creator, you can have QR codes in your, your videos when you do your You know, have some commerce tools and there's like WooCommerce integrations, and if you're a cafe, then you have like a point of sale and, we have like a, a loop out extension which I'm very excited about, for those cafe and bar owners who just wanna accumulate Bitcoin and put on the hardware wallet somewhere. So yeah, we have extensions which, so you basically install LNbits, just the core software, and then currently we're packaging all the extensions in with it 'cause there's only like thirty, but soon they will be extrapolated out so you install LN Search for an a, a, a plug-in, go get it, install it, and then, boom, you've got all this extra functionality which will be relevant for you." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:06", "start": 965.86, "text": "Fantastic, yeah. And I think it's really cool. And I, I was looking, obviously researching a bit, and I've seen you've got it available on Raspiblitz and Umbrel as well. So this is like an easy install thing that you can run it off, where it's running off your own node, but then you can, as you were saying, be the uncle Jim for your family or your" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:30", "start": 990.03, "text": "system, and we can chat, we can get into all the different extensions and things like that, but I'm also just curious, and as well, because, how has your journey been like trying to support the d- some of the different implementations? As I see, you have LND from Lightning Labs and Core Lightning from Blockstream as well. And so, was that difficult to build in the support for that, or was that just, you know, all as part of your own journey? You were already supporting these things anyway?" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "16:54", "start": 1013.72, "text": "Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. Yeah, we'd already like inter- inter- interacted with their APIs and RPCs and whatever else. And, and actually, what LNbits does is, is quite dumb really. I mean, it just, it, it goes and gets an invoice and checks if an invoice is being paid, and then also if it, if there's a stream of payments which you can connect to, you know, some Web Socket or something, then it'll connect to that and then just listen to invoices and see if they're relevant to the LNbits install. So each connection Of functions, and they're all the same functions. If you go into like core, LNbits core wallets, you'll see that there's just, a bunch of, funding sources. And it's great because we had like a clear support recently, and then Cliche as well, which, I don't know if you know, if you've played around much with the hosted channel stuff, but Cliche is kind of like a fork of the thing they're using in Simple Bitcoin Wallet in order for you to have instant inbound liquidity, these hosted channel things. C bits, and then you have this node underneath, yeah, so, and then have instant inbound liquidity, and then i-i-in such a way where we're not custodians of funds. So it becomes, it becomes like quite exciting. So yeah, every time there's a new funding source for Lightning, you can easily just implement it and add it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:08", "start": 1087.71, "text": "Fantastic, yeah, that's really cool to see. And I just think it's such a cool thing because it's like, as I was looking through, I saw there were all these different extensions. There was even a Satoshi" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:24", "start": 1103.66, "text": "you know, around Bitcoin in like twenty eleven, twenty twelve, twenty thirteen, many people had that memory of playing Satoshi Dice, where you like send a small amount of satoshis to a Bitcoin address and then you receive some back, and there was like a known probability of winning or losing. And so I played around, I saw on, on the demo version, you've got that there, I thought that was very-- It was just really cool to see that, like, what was old is new again, and we're doing light-- we're doing it using Lightning now, and now anyone can" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:53", "start": 1133.3, "text": "So all of" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "18:54", "start": 1134.12, "text": "these, all of these extensions, we kind of just rolled them out quickly 'cause we wanted to show, look, you can do this, you can do that, you can do this. And I think it's just powerful to have, like, when you install, you have a load of extensions, but, but they can all be worked into. And one of the things I really wanna add to Satoshi Dice is the Provable Fair stuff, which I think we could add, where you get like a hash thing of, you know, before you actually pay and, or some The way it works is an all-in euro pay, and if you win, you get an all-in euro withdraw. So an all-in euro pay, you can just have a static QR code you send payments to, and you get this link back, which is your winnings. so you could, you could print one of these, like a high roller, one of these QRS out, and then stick it in Paddington train station, and see if any high roller Bitcoiners come along and, you know, scan that QR code, and they could potentially win, you know, tens of thousands of sat" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "19:53", "start": 1193.34, "text": "Gambling software is so much fun, so there's always these solutions for being built by people who don't particularly like gambling, but they like making the software for it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:01", "start": 1201.47, "text": "Yeah, I, and I think it's just really cool because there's so many different possible applications, right? And so for some listeners who maybe they're not as into the technical aspects of it, or maybe they haven't explored this as much, there's just so many possible applications, it's hard to even explain for people because you've got like vouchers, you can have point of sale, you know, you can have all these different I think it'd be good, or you can run paywalls on this. So let's talk through some of these cases so people can understand, oh, okay, if I would, if I was to run my own, say, Raspberry Blitz, I could install LNbits on this, I could set up an instance there, and I could create some different accounts. Let's talk through some of those cases for people. So, do you wanna just talk through the faucets? Like, how does that work? how would, how would you make a faucet using LNbits to, let's say" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "20:54", "start": 1253.64, "text": "and this is why I love the LNURL stuff, and I love things like hosted channels, 'cause they're developments and, solutions which have been built from the ground up as opposed to protocol top-down, so it's very much from the community of users and builders. So I, I think that's really exciting, and they address real world need and what we, what we want Lightning to, how we want it to work, and then that can inform protocol development. But so early on, you know, like me with my sweet machine and my little e-paper screen, I didn Achieve that is your wallet, is just allowed to a get request to a server. If it gets an invoice back, it says, \"Do you wanna pay this invoice?\" And then you just say, \"Yes.\" And that's essentially what an LNURL pay is. You can do some more funky stuff, like you can set, like, limits and stuff, like a min/max and blah, blah, blah. But initially, that's basically what it is. You can-- So then you can have a static QR code, you can keep just scanning it, and basically your" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "21:50", "start": 1309.76, "text": "phone is In that you can scan a QR code and then the server will say to you, \"Send back a Jason,\" just so basically saying, \"Send me an invoice between this amount and this amount, and I'll pay it.\" And then your phone says, \"Do you want to claim these satoshis?\" You say, \"Yes,\" and then your wallet is essentially just making an invoice, sending it to the server, and the server is then paying it on your, you know, so you get the funds. For the user, you're scanning a QR code, saying yes, and then you're" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "22:23", "start": 1343.36, "text": "And then there's also other forms of LNRG, there's LNRG channels, you can easily, you know, I think Bitrefill uses for, for easily opening channels with nodes. And then there's, LNRG auth, which is getting more, more traction, which is a nice way, actually, I mean, it's not even lightning related at all, it's just, I think you just sign like a message or something, and then you can use that to authorize, access, so, because you can do that from a lightning So it's a very powerful collection suite of tools and LNURL is, is Lightning URL, simply, and the protocol has been, had a lot of hours put into it, you know, if you go to that protocol repo, so if you Google like GitHub LNURL, you'll get to the protocol repo and you'll see all the different- Varieties of LNURL and then all the different wallets which support it, and those wallets supporting it is often the people who've developed LNURL, such as, Fiatjaf and Hampus, them actually going to those wallets and like helping them PR and, and, and get those, get that implemented, because builders and users, we just wanted it to exist, you know, we wanted, I think, like, simple Bitcoin wallet, not simple Bitcoin wallet, the Lightning wallet at the time, just wanted an easy way to do channel stuff, I think, and that's why the LN George Vassaro, and that was in New York, and, we were talking about this. I asked Christian Decker, actually, I said, \"When are we gonna get static QR codes? I don't wanna have to keep generating invoices.\" And he's like, \"Yeah, it's, you know, we know it's important for people, it's the feature everyone requests, but we've got a lot of other things we need to kind of address first.\" And it's like, \"Okay, so do we sit here and wait for the protocol people to build the things, or" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "24:04", "start": 1443.63, "text": "do" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "24:09", "start": 1449.11, "text": "Microcontrollers, these ESP32s, and then actually hacked together like a demo version, which was cool. so we hacked a Clair wallet, so a Clair wallet would do that get request, and then, and I, I think that's probably the first example of an all-in-one URL pay, and it is recorded, it's in the Lightning, New York stream as well, so it's, it's quite a nice little bit of history that is. and whenever I'm with him at a conference, you know, and, and, and people say, \" I was going with this, what we talking about? Oh, the faucets. Okay, yeah, yeah. So I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so, the first thing I made was the Sinclair faucet, which was, named after Clive Sinclair, the, the great British inventor, and, you could pay some sats, you could pay, so you could select, how often you wanted your faucet to spit out, and then how much you wanted to put in, I think, and then how much each time it spat out" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "25:09", "start": 1509.13, "text": "Set. Then it would show you an invoice, you'd pay the invoice, then it would just have a page you could share with people, and then they could just pull this faucet every hour. People soon like hacked around it, made bots and stuff for it. But I, I, that's Alonur, I withdraw, I always feel is very powerful, like, 'cause you can use it for faucets. So currently there's a guy driving around, the US, and I helped him spin up an LNbits, and he's, he's, he's actually doing, it's Things, and then he's making a little LNQR code, a withdraw faucet, and putting inside these pill things, and then he's hiding them all around the US, and he's like traveling all around the US doing this, and then putting on TikTok, and then he sort of films the location of where it might be, and then people have to go and search for this little tiny, pill box thing. So you can do faucets with it, which is fun, for treasure hunts and ATMs and whatever else. But I also think that an LNQR withdraw can work" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "26:09", "start": 1569.07, "text": "Permission to pull funds once a month, and then they can pull funds once a month. with Bitcoin, it's like, it's one of those sort of, again, one of these blacklisted topics, the idea of subscription models, that we think everything's gonna be pay as you go. But I can tell you, like, now my Luna node, which I do pay as you go on, has again gone down because again, I haven't gone in and I haven't paid for my, my service services, which I'm supposed to do every month. So subscription services are still quite" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "26:39", "start": 1599.23, "text": "That was quite interesting. By, by the way, if anyone's interested in the LNURL, it's a very, I don't know, intro-- I think it's a great technology. If you go on Telegram and look for LNURL Mafia, there's a great group where people discuss stuff, and like, like with the, the Bolt cards by Danny in, in the Coin Corner lot, which uses LNURL Pay, LNURL Withdraw, yeah, so you give them an LNURL Withdraw, and then they can pull funds from your account. Yeah, that, all that I did an experiment where I got an LNR withdrawal and put it on an NFC tag and then did Tap and Pay. And when you do Tap and Pay, a light-lightning payment, and it's Tap and Pay, and you have, you aren't scanning a QR code and doing this with your phone trying to get that QR code, it's much more like how the technology should work, and it's so fast as well. It's like, it is faster than when you do Tap and Pay with a, you know, traditional legacy bank card. it's quicker. Yeah, yeah The system, but actually if you, if you were to see behind the veil of legacy payments and, and Visa and all this sort of stuff and all the handshakes which go on with banks and things, now that's complicated, you know, like we, we, we, we, we're, we're very simple compared to that. So because of that, I think it works quickly, it works quicker and often. So yeah, so it made sense to build that into LNbits. So if I have an LNbits install running on my serv- on my, you know, my Raspberry Experiment, I wanna have an ATM connected to, you know, my LN-LNbits install and get to display these faucets so people can pull the funds. As well as that, we've also got LNURL Pay, and then we've got experiments like the Satoshi Dice thing where we're kind of marrying the two. There's also the offline shop one, which is one of Fiat Jaff's, and that's, that's a cool extension. So you can make a list of products, and then it'll just generate QR codes, static LNURL Pays for those QR codes, and then you don't" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "28:39", "start": 1719.15, "text": "For something, they, as a receipt, they get the next word in the word list, and then they can go to the merchant and just say, you know, bunny rabbit or whatever, I don't know, antelope, and then they-- then the merchant either has the word list or has memorized the word list and can say, \"Oh, right, okay, that is the next word on the word list.\" And it's just a way of verifying payments in kind of like a market scenario, you know? for just like a single, a single merchant. But that, what often happens" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "29:09", "start": 1749.29, "text": "I came up with the, LNPOS thing, which is the hardware point of sale, and because I've got LNbits, I can just make an easy, extension, LNURL devices, where I can like register, 'cause basically the way it works is you have an offline point of sale, and the point of sale itself generates a four digit PIN when you input an amount and press the hash tag, it encrypts the four digit PIN, Stephan Livera helped here a lot, by the way, making some great crypto stuff, it encrypts the four digit PIN, puts it URL pays, it's just a URL, so we can, on the end, we can tack on, you know, data, so we just tack on some, you know, scrambled encrypted, data about the PIN and a POS ID. Then once you, you scan the, LNURL pay to pay the POS, your phone is then doing that get request to the server, passing over that encrypted data, the server can then, using the POS ID, which is also in that, URL, can locate the POS in LNURL devices on LNbits, can get the key Paid, if it's being paid, it can then decrypt the key, then send the key back as a receipt to the person who's just scanned the QR code. So essentially, you have a POS where you can input an amount, press the hash tag, someone can scan it, and then as a receipt, they get the four digit PIN, but a bunch of stuff has happened there, but it means that the, the POS can be offline, which I think is, is, 'cause I often all our hardware is pretty cheap, so it becomes quite powerful in like countries which are adopting Bitcoin but On hardware device, be completely offline and then can verify that the payments are going through, and there's no way they can get that four-digit PIN unless they've like hacked that person's server or something. So, but that was a direct result of the offline shop, thing. And then also the, the Blastomat a lot. So the Blastomat, the, Parallel Pos people, we have a Blastomat extension, so you can easily connect your LNbits to your Blastomat, and," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:02", "start": 1861.67, "text": "there, there, so" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "31:03", "start": 1863.39, "text": "just to be clear, just the listeners who There was the Fossa, the free and open source ATM, and then there was the Lightning ATM, and then there was the BlastGoMap built by the parallelly powerless people in Prague, so HCCP. and they, you know, that's where Trezor came from, and they, they built some great stuff. And, the BlastGoMap is a, an ATM, but you, you-- when you put money in and it, it gives you that LNURL to withdraw, the ATM itself is completely offline, so it, it, you can just stick it Really useful. I, I don't think, 'cause I, we go to a lot of these conferences and we take our hardware to these conferences, and I don't, I never wanna underestimate like the amount of impact not having internet at conferences had on developing these things. You know, if you make the point of sale and they require internet, or you can make ATMs that require internet, and then the conference internet is terrible because thousands of people are suddenly on the internet, and you're like, \"Oh, it'd be better if it was offline.\" So yes, there's all this altruistic building" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "32:09", "start": 1929.13, "text": "Works offline, it's an ATM, it's great, great project, and they have an extension LNbits, so you can easily, so basically the funds will then be pulled out of a, a wallet on your LNbits, 'cause then you, you have that added functionality of, of being able to limit exposure to funds. The ATM can only have, say, access to a hundred pounds worth of funds, and then as when those funds run out, you can get notified, and then you can go in and you can top it up, or you can put some more atomic script in" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "32:39", "start": 1959.07, "text": "So again, because that, I think that being offline and a hardware device mixed with Fiat Cash offline, shop idea, that kind of turned into the LNPOS, you know, four digit PIN idea. and, and again, it's why these Telegram groups are good. I think I dropped that in the LNURL Mafia group as just to, you know, feel it out. I was like, \"Oh, I've got this idea, we could do this.\" And then, you know, if you have the right people, if you have someone like Hampus turn around and say, \"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:08", "start": 1987.63, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Have you left your coins on the exchanges? Unchained Capital are running a \"Drain the Exchanges\" promotion for Conseilge onboarding. So Conseilge onboarding is a program where they can help you set up your multi-signature vault, and they are running a discount up until the eighth of September. So it's, the price is down to a simple two hundred and fifty dollars, and if you use the code Livera, you get a, you get an extra fifty dollars off. This program helps you set up your vault, you get a guided And withdrawing from an exchange or a single signature wallet into your multisig vault. So this is time limited up until the eighth of September. So think about improving your security and giving yourself that additional peace of mind. You are removing single points of failure in your security setup. So that website is unchained dot com slash concierge. Use the code livera to get a discount. 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And finally, those of you looking for Bitcoin hardware, my favorite is the Cold Card. CoinKite dot com are the people who make this and produce this. It's gone through various iterations over the years, and the latest version is the Mark IV, which recently came out. It's got two secure elements, it has NFC support, and it has just a range of features. And the cool thing is, when you use the Cold Card, you'll end up actually learning Really cool tool, I recommend it for yourself or even holding and buying some additional cold cards that you might use for when you're onboarding your family and friends to teach them how to use Bitcoin with hardware security. So that website is coinkite dot com and use the code levera to get a discount on your cold card hardware devices. Back to the show. Yeah, no, I mean, I, I love hearing about these, because I think there's, there's so many uses and there's all these different aspects of the Bitcoin and Lightning world that are interacting, and, so I think it's really cool to see, and so this could also be useful, even just like, just the standard, you know, with LNbits, just the standard POS, right? Let's say you're a cafe owner, and it's got a user manager in there, so you can, I guess you, the idea" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "35:54", "start": 2154.26, "text": "If you, probably for the staff only, if they had their own LNbits account, account, they would just let the people working in the cafe open accounts. So user manager is actually more designed for someone using LNbits in their stack. So we have, we have a couple of power users, you know, you have like, the, like the Lightning Tipbot that runs, on Telegram, that runs on LNbits, and it's been able to use the user manager and have LNbits like, s- you know, just divide up accounts for users and wallets and all this All, the extensions in AnonBits so it could create faucet links, it can do all the things like, 'cause it's all of the, all these things built into AnonAnonBits have APIs. So it's some, a piece of, a, a lightweight piece of software, incredibly, you can put into your software stack, it's very powerful. So user managers really beneficial for that. But on the, on, I mean, so I think it's very important to think of payment journeys and, and we have, in different countries, you have different payment journeys, different use There's a cafe near me, the guy who has the cafe is receptive to Bitcoin, likes Bitcoin, has some Bitcoin. I haven't yet told him the things I'm building because it's just not ready. Like what I want for the experience is I-- So he has an LN-- we can use my LNbits, in fact. So he uses my LNbits install, okay? He sets up a, a TPOS, which is the, the point of sale extension on LNbits. there was a great PR actually recently by, by Lee, Lee, Lee Reisman, Lee Re Fantastic. So, yeah, so the cafe owner can have a wallet on MyLNbits, a user account on MyLNbits, a wallet. He can have two wallets. He can have a wallet for the cafe, he can have a wallet for tips, and then he can use this software point of sale, and you can use it on your phone, it's fully phone responsive, and then the, the one you're using on your phone is completely air-gapped from the actual, LNbits, so there's no way they can get back to any wallet details from this phone. It hasn't Okay, scan this QR code with your phone, and you have a point of sale. It's denominated in their local fiat currency for the people working in the cafe, in GBP, so they input an amount, and then it generates a QR code. It asks me if I want a tip, I don't tip, and then it generates a QR code. When the payment happens, it splits between those two wallets. Now, that cafe owner, the question will be when he's accumulated, you know, when I, I go in there, I drink coffee in there most days, so when he There's not that much you can do with your light, you know, go pay for some VPS or some, you know, or some, s-s-s-yeah, go get a server somewhere or a VPN or sorry, like there's not that much you can do with the Lightning stuff. What, what he wants to do is he wants it as a way of accumulating some Bitcoin, right? So now we have the Bolt Store Exchange extension, which, DNI's been working on, it's so cool, and you can get it to listen to a wallet," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "38:54", "start": 2334.24, "text": "Take the hundred pounds, right? And then it will loop out to an on-chain address. So you just need to give it an on-chain address. Now, even better than that, is we have the on-chain, extension in LNbits, so you can give that an xPub. So actually, what can happen is the on-chain extension can generate a fresh address, and then every hundred pounds, it can loop out to that fresh address, right? And even better than that, we have a, Vlad Stan, another one of our contributors, I worked with him ages Hardware wallet which I built. I worked with him ages ago to come up with a browser too, but we never quite made it. And then recently we got together and he's, you know, like, I've got the hardware into his hands and now he's tinkering away. And we've built like, you know, like a, a, a, an eight pound hardware wallet, which we can connect to with Web, so just connect to it with a USB, connect to LNbits, this has a private key on, it can sign a PSBT, it can do all that stuff. Funds are. This is cheap enough for me to just be able to give him. I know that's not the greatest security advice, but this is his, his, onboarding journey, right? And, in that onboarding journey, I can give him this hardware wallet, show him how it works, says, \"Right, you're gonna accumulate Bitcoin from me buying coffees, it's gonna go into this hardware wallet, and then this is how you spend the funds from that hardware wallet.\" And the, the on-chain wallet extension is in, in LNbits is, is absolutely fantastic" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "40:24", "start": 2424.24, "text": "And just you toggle a switch, and then you can just, you'd have a nice slider, and you can select the fee you wanna pay. Then you can also do coin selection as well, so you just click another switch, and you can, and you can randomize it, and you can just-- it's so good. Vlad Stan worked on, Bitcoin JS, in the past, so he knows his stuff on, on chain. So that is, I think, as a collection of tools for that cafe owner, then when those things are built, which is very shortly, 'cause" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "40:55", "start": 2454.54, "text": "This has also been great, we've been building a lot of tests into LNbits, and he's building a great testing suite for his own extension. So he's very pedantic, which is good, I suppose, 'cause you're dealing with bigger, bigger quantities of funds. But that collection of extensions, I can set up the cafe owner with that, he can use my LNbits, I can charge him like a two percent transaction fee for using my LNbits or more, maybe five percent transaction fee. But I can say to him, \"Look, if you don't want me to charge you this Channels, so he doesn't have to worry about, you know, setting up, up channels, balancing channels so much. We can do it through these hosted channels and kind of automate that process a little bit, and then add some, some on-chain channels as well, some, some, you know, normal lightning channels as well into it. So you have like this onboarding journey where, a-and, and then his risk profile for using my, my service is obviously the, the fee I charge per transaction, but then also, yeah, it's like a hundred quid which is going into that wallet, This is something very interesting, 'cause again, you know, going back to something we said earlier on, there was this idea that Lightning would be kind of, Lightning nodes would be easier to use and channels would be easier to use, and they're not, they're quite hard and still quite expensive. That will get better with channel factories and autopilot stuff, so I don't wanna flood too much. But when you have countries adopting Bitcoin and they have limited resources, some of these things become nice ways for, you know, some merchant in, in El Salvador is on subsistence wage, a couple They don't mind using a custodial service, but they don't wanna put too many funds on there for too long, particularly if it's a service just run locally and there's not that much accountability. But what they can do is they can use extensions like the on-chain swap one to just push those funds out and put them somewhere secure. another extension which doesn't have Lightning ways, we have Scrub and Scrub, semi-custodial remittance, something Bitcoin, I'm not comfortable with the acronym yet, but we've got the name Scrub," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "42:50", "start": 2570.42, "text": "cause I like the name Scrub. That's what they've got to use 'cause they can't afford to run their own node. And then payments from this, you know, sketchy LNbits installer and buy some local kit, you know, every ten dollars or whatever, or even less, every couple of dollars, right? Every now and then it's," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:06", "start": 2585.59, "text": "it, it flushes out or sweeps out. Or," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "43:08", "start": 2587.95, "text": "or constantly, actually, you can just constantly like just be a semi-custodial thing so you can access the point of sale and LNbits, but when a payment comes in, you'll just go, I'll just push Well, ideally, yes, and we will get there, but for now, how do we build the best possible payment service for people? How do we build the best form of custodianship where there is some accountability, like hosted channels? So yeah, that's, it's, it's, it's, it's a very interesting area to be working, and that is a different payment experience to the, the cafe owner in, in the UK or Europe, yeah, gotcha, yeah, because they have that circular economy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:45", "start": 2625.46, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting because there's, there's different challenges" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:54", "start": 2634.24, "text": "Fiat because I need some fiat to pay my business expenses. I've got to pay staff, I've got to pay this, that, and the other. And so I guess this is part about, this is about smoothing that process to make it certain parts of it automated or certain parts of it at least built in into a way that's a little bit easier. I know one other example that I saw recently, and I think, people were showing this as well, is this idea of automated or recurring payments to a lightning address. And so you could, like, hypothetically, let's Address, he could sort of set up a way to automated pay the staff a certain amount every two weeks, as an example. So, oh, well," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "44:32", "start": 2671.81, "text": "we, we, so we had, so one of the extensions we had, again, off the back, so we had, CryptoGraffiti, he did a live stream and he had a QR code on the screen. What was cool about this, FitchaF made us extension just for this, actually collaborated with CryptoGraffiti to make this extension, and he had an LNR pay on the screen 10% to the DJ and then 90% to the producer of the song. And we all got excited by the split payments idea, so we have a split payments extension in LNbits where you can just say to a wallet, like, \"If this wallet gets funds, then split it between this wallet, this wallet, and this wallet.\" And then, you know, as you said at the very beginning of your, of, of your show, I, I have certain, like, you know, I like the idea of cooperatives, for example, and the idea of," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "45:24", "start": 2724.46, "text": "You get X percent, you get X percent, and then, and they kind of work it out themselves and, and then X percent goes towards, you know, the, the upkeep of the service and, costs or whatever. And then every time, at point of sale, every time a payment is made, it's then split across those different participants in that cooperative. And then I think, well, what happens if you have like a tree of splits? So I go buy a laptop from the shop, and when I make that payment, 'cause we're not beholden to, a weird transactions, whatever, we could have like payment splitting, for departments, so you go to distribution, manufacturing, you know, marketing, and then from there it then splits against, splits that, and the, you know, the cleaner on the shop floor is getting these sats dribbling in into their phone, and then the, the, the sats stop, stop dribbling in, you know, all the, the, the millisats stop dribbling in from all these laptops which are being sold, and then that cleaner then becomes a bit more engaged in, why has it stopped or sales, and it's like, okay, well, maybe we should give them more, and you give them more, and then you have the problem of there's not enough in manufacturing to keep up with the demand, and blah, blah, blah. So you, you get these participants in this collective all becoming a bit more engaged. That's my own personal interest in that particular idea of splitting payments. I think it could radicalize and ra-radically change production in, in, in some scenarios, and I think Lightning can allow that sort of stuff, and it becomes interesting, skipping in a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:48", "start": 2808.06, "text": "free Say Breeze or Fountain, and people, doing the podcasting two point o, and they're having a certain split go to the host and a certain split going to- Well, so," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "47:04", "start": 2823.59, "text": "so split payments came, split payments and the cryptography thing came first, and Adam Curry, he was a huge, huge fan of LNbits, and he did this amazing shout out on some podcast where he's explaining his Bitcoin journey and how he installed Raspibit, and then he did a one-click install of LNbits, and he's like, \"Holy shit, look at all the things you could do And said, you know, I'm interested in this podcasting thing, and I was, I was, he was talking about RSS feeds, and I was like, it, it didn't really like tickle my fancy, but I wish I'd like engaged more with him at the time. But that is an extension I really wanna build. I was talking to Anita Posh about it actually, where you can just, upload your podcast to the, your LNbits install" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "47:48", "start": 2867.88, "text": "and create that RSS feed, the RSS two point oh, whether it's, is it RSS two point oh? Have the funds go to, I guess, go to an LNbits wallet. I need to look into it, but I think that'll make a cool, again, a cool extension for people, yeah, if they've got LNbits installed and they're doing podcasting, they might as well make a-- And I'm not sure whether it'll work. If you have any feedback on that concept, would that work?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:08", "start": 2888.45, "text": "Maybe, I, I think it's early days with all of this stuff. I think it's hard to sort of figure out exactly, you know, where, where, You know, podcasting two point oh stuff, you know, I've played around with it, obviously, so, yeah, I, I just think-- I guess it's," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "48:31", "start": 2910.53, "text": "yeah, it's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:31", "start": 2910.81, "text": "early." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "48:31", "start": 2911.31, "text": "Yeah. It's like a lot of these things, like, and this is often the complaint and the constant, the thing we complain about is sort of like the LN URL mafia group. A bunch of us, like Bumi and me, you know, we're building something, we'll be like, \"Oh, we-- what we really want, I was in LN URL Pay Browser to be able to check the payment and deliver something, I think, or so, something like that. There was something which AlernioPay couldn't do, and both of me and Boomi had the same issue, and we were like, \"It'd be nice if you could just have like a AlernioPay verify thing where it could just like check to make sure the payment's gone through.\" And then there's this kind of kickback, and people are like, \"Well, no, but no one wants to build things with it.\" Or AlernioPay, one of the things functions But actually, no, I, I tell a lie, it is more supported now. But anyway, there was a period where it wasn't very well supported, and a bunch of us were like, \"Actually, this, you should be supported.\" And it's like, \"Well, what tools use it?\" And it's like, \"Well, none currently, but if you build the ability to make the thing, then, you know, people will build things on top of it.\" So it's kind of like the podcasting two point oh thing. If we build an extension in LNbits" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "49:46", "start": 2986.2, "text": "to make it" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "49:54", "start": 2994.24, "text": "Build the tools first, and then, and then allow, give, give people the tools so they can easily build the things, and then people will be creative and build interesting things. Yeah. so yeah, I like you, yeah, I'll just see where it goes, but try and get the tools into the hands. Yeah. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:06", "start": 3006.45, "text": "I think another area I'm curious as well, just to get your views on that, is just paywalls. So even just people who want to, let's say they wanna do a website and use LNbits as the underlying way of running a paywall, can" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "50:24", "start": 3024.24, "text": "I think maybe, maybe I think I might have spoken, spoken to you about this in the, just spoken to you about this in the past, 'cause I've always had an interest in the paywall stuff. I, I really wanted from, from the beginning of, when I first used yours, Alex Bosworth's yours, which is a great example of lightning being used, I, I just wanted that in, in WordPress, like, a pay to read more button, you know, instead of a read more button. And, I, I put out a," }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "50:54", "start": 3054.22, "text": "Most there, but they weren't quite what I wanted. So, but Boomi's actually from, from Alby, he's made a great, plugin for, for WordPress where you can do, I can't remember what it's called, but if you Google it, and, you can, you can pay to read more, you can do that thing where you put this link in an article and then, so you can give them a little snippet. And I just think, you know, when it comes to press, like if I go to the Financial Times, someone sends me a link" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "51:24", "start": 3084.22, "text": "really want to read it. I would pay like fifty p or a pound or something to access this, this article. and probably, you know, in the great scheme of things, if I was paying a subscription and accessing this newspaper, they'd probably calculate that this article's worth, you know, fractions of pennies. I would overpay if there was a paywall option as well, and it'd be so easy to add that paywall option in there. And there's, there's this, I cross my fingers and I hope that the Financial Times is a gimmick on the Satoshi, on" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "51:54", "start": 3114.28, "text": "Articles using the Lightning Network or, or even just the one article on, you know, what is today, okay, it's the white paper day, blah, blah. I think it'd be a really interesting gimmick. But yeah, for, for personal blogs and people running it, it's just needed to exist and now it does exist and people can use it. And again, I'm sure people use it in really interesting ways, but not, for not just, you know, unlocking written content," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:16", "start": 3136.08, "text": "'cause you could lock, unlock all sorts of content with it. Well, I think one Bubble, we know about some of these things, but I think the average person doesn't actually understand and maybe they haven't taken the time to actually try and pull these, you know, the pieces exist, they just need to combine them and put them out there. And so even say Marty Bent, he's got, I know he's doing something with Ghost and having a way of paying for his newsletter, you know, you can pay one off a-and see, get past the paywall, but the same kind of functionality exists in LNbits, and I think a lot of people just don't know And now get paid content on their website." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "52:57", "start": 3177.11, "text": "Yeah, so the, the LNbits extension is great, but it, that's, you hit, you give someone a link, and then they hit a link, and they're like, \"Okay, pay this invoice, pay the invoice,\" and then it re-routes them to the, the thing which they're unlocking. But then there's nothing to stop them taking that thing and then sharing it with people, as a way to kind of get around that paywall. It's very useful, and actually you can like paywall a paywall Or something to begin with before it became in LNP. So, yeah, no, it's, it's Paywalls are very, very, very powerful, I agree with you completely. And, actually, I think that, that idea of, of not knowing where everything is is getting worse, 'cause like, like the Bolts, Dark Exchange extension, which DNI is building, I had no idea this thing called Bolts, Dark Exchange existed and how cool it was, you know? And, it existed for a while and how slick and a finished product it looks like" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "53:54", "start": 3234.26, "text": "Projects I haven't heard of. And, it's kind of like a few years ago, I don't know about you, but I could kind of keep tabs on what was, what was happening everywhere, but now it's just, it's so tricky. That's impossible. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:05", "start": 3245.09, "text": "Yeah, but I mean, it's cool to see, it's cool to see there's so many, uses and- It's a good problem to have, yeah. Yeah. So I would probably, I think listeners would wanna hear maybe just from you as one of the guys behind LNbits, If you could just outline some of the, the people who are using LNbits today already, so as you said, there's Lightning Tipbot, there's other projects, and, you know, people who are using LNbits in the background. So do you wanna just spell that out for people?" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "54:30", "start": 3269.93, "text": "Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of people. I mean, so anyone, you know, running one of our hardware projects like the POS or anything, they're, they're, they're using LNbits. But then also, you know, we have, so we have single users, we have people" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "54:47", "start": 3286.64, "text": "In your brow, in your phone, you can actually install it as well if you're using Chrome, it's like a progressive web app, so it installs like an app, and then it's just like a phone app, you know? But then, so a lot of people use that just as a, a wallet connected to their node, when they're out and about spending funds, and that's really interesting to see, for single users. But then there's other people who are running kind of custodian services for friends and family. I know, a couple" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "55:11", "start": 3311.42, "text": "of people And also like we have big power users using it as part of their stack. I know when all the stuff kicked off in El Salvador, the Guatemalan bank, IBC, just with the-- they just used the point of sale extension as a entire business product. So they, went to, you know, I know a hairdresser or a shop or whatever and said, \"You're okay, you need to accept Bitcoin. Here's a point of sale, use that. When you've, you know, you want the cash, come to us, we'll give you the cash.\"" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "55:44", "start": 3343.94, "text": "And And then just empty the funds out, the, you know, delete the funds from the wallet. So, yeah, you can use it. I mean, that was kind of, it kind of sucked at that time, 'cause that was, I suppose it was a year or so ago, and LNbits at that point was still, we still had like a few critical bugs in the framework, so it would like, if you, if you, if you used it, if it was a busy server, it would like trip over itself and then it won't wake itself back up. So we had So it kind of sucks that that, so with the Ibis guys, I mean, I spoke to them at the time, I was like, \"Guys, you realize we're beta and like we have bugs. You're using it for a product, for a bank, it scares me.\" And then they ended up developing their, their own solution, which is basically the same, like it's, you can see the lineage in the, in the POS. Ibis are a great company, I'm really excited about them, and I'm glad that they're in that part of the world, Just stick to it, 'cause why wouldn't they? 'Cause it works great, flawless, you know? It doesn't trip over itself, it's fast, it's so fast. So, yeah, more and more people, as it becomes, as it's become stable, I mean, we're still beta, but I feel like we're on the road to coming out of beta now, do use it as part of their stack." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "57:06", "start": 3426.18, "text": "we have, the Lightning Tip, I don't know if the, 'cause, yeah, we had the Lightning Tipbot which uses it, and As a merchant for a shop, the, the classic problem with free and open source projects is you have no idea who's using your shit until someone sends you a picture and they're in like, you know, the deepest, darkest jungles of Peru and they go into some cafe and somebody's using LNbits in, on their phone for a point of sale for, to accept lightning, and you're like, \"Oh, okay, cool.\" And, well, there was another, there was an example like that, I think it was the Central African Republic actually, there was this nice little video of and he was using, I think he was using Lightning Tipbot, the Telegram thing which I just mentioned before, one of our power users. So like they were like, \"Yeah, they were super excited about it, but then also 'cause using LNbits in the back end too. So it's, you know, hi- This is what, it's the banking of the unbanked stuff, which we're, I mean, we're interested in giving people good payments experience, aren't we? And giv-ing access, as much access as possible. So if someone in lim- with" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "58:17", "start": 3496.68, "text": "We get our issues, you know, in our repo, we have people PR'ing, so it's like, okay, so Ali just recently PR'd, an invoicing, extension, which is really cool actually, just makes an invoice link you can give to someone, and they can make payments and pay down their, whatever the invoice is, and it keeps track of that. It's actually dead useful. But so he's obviously using it in some capacity where, or he want, has some customer or something, he wants to use it in that capacity. So you I don't know, who knows, you know, you know, it's just using it. People are" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:49", "start": 3528.75, "text": "out there and they're just using it for whatever, you know, and they could even, I've seen, just from playing around, you can have it as a tip jar, you can use it to sell event tickets, in your own sort of self-hosted way. Let's say, let's say you're a Bitcoin meetup organizer and you wanna organize a barbecue, but you wanna charge people, you know, whatever, thirty bucks to pay for the food and the drinks and whatever So, I encourage people to check it out. The website is l n bits dot com, and of course, make sure you follow Ben. He's on Twitter. His handle is at arc b t c, a r c b t c. so, Ben, any final thoughts out there for listeners?" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "59:32", "start": 3571.69, "text": "Yes, we also have, 'cause when you get to that, l n bits dot com website, we also have, a, a version of l n bits running, go, called Infinity. and that uses and handles extensions slightly differently." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "59:47", "start": 3586.62, "text": "It's the one which people, we're all working on to get out of beta, and then as soon as we do, we wanna start using and playing around with this, the, the Go version, and, and it is being worked on actively, and people are using it as part of their stack and things. But, we just need to get the, the Legend, the Python version out of beta first, and then make it fully usable for people. And then the Go version is also very interesting, the way, the way, 'cause it makes developing extensions kind of really easy. So that That, but, you know, that's, that's the more experimental version, which we've been playing around with. so yeah, not really. if you wanna check out the hardware stuff, we have, I think we got a link, I think there's a repo for the hardware wallet which we can use with the LNbits on-chain extension in the LNbits repo. But, we should also probably link that in the on-chain extension itself, in the, we have a little about bit, and the point of sale, if that's And also my ATM, the Fossa, and other projects, sweet machines, and all the little gizmos and whatnots, and oh, Bitcoin Switch, that's a nice project, just, you know, a very cheap little module, you can accept a payment, turn something on, make something, you know, happen, like wh- whatever, like a vending machine. I got a vending machine project on there as well on ARC-BTC on GitHub. But yeah, check out LNbits, check out the hardware stuff, come into the LNbits Telegram group, h d t dot m e back" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "01:01:16", "start": 3676.94, "text": "A good story writes itself. That's kind of like Alan Biss. As soon as someone understands what it is, they're like, \"Oh, we could do, blah, blah, blah.\" And they, they come up with some great idea, and you're like, \"Oh, yeah, great,\" 'cause they've got, you know, different life experiences and they have their own, you know, ideas. So it's always exciting when you have someone new come into the project, even if they don't think themselves as being very technical or creative, you'll suddenly find that they start coming out" }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "01:01:46", "start": 3706.64, "text": "thing off the back of someone else's idea, so you don't necessarily have to be a developer to contribute, but obviously we always are looking for contributors, so please do, you know, contribute if you can. And, yeah, that's it, I think. Oh, there's also, there's also a, a, a Telegram channel for the hardware stuff called Makerbits, t dot m e backslash Makerbits, and that's cool, we got some, you know, a couple of electrical engineers making, fabricating POS boards so they can come with a POS, I think a couple of the Bescomat people are in there as well. yeah, it's, it's a nice, that's a nice group too to, to check out." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:22", "start": 3742.32, "text": "Excellent. Well, listeners, the links will be in the show notes. And, Ben, thank you for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "ben_arc", "time": "01:02:27", "start": 3747.11, "text": "Bye-bye, thank you. Cheers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:02:29", "start": 3749.15, "text": "Get the show notes at stephanelivera dot com slash four zero seven. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }