{ "episodeId": "SLP412", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "moritz": { "name": "Moritz", "role": "guest", "tag": "MORITZ" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.41, "text": "Hi and welcome 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. It's gonna be on November 10th and 11th in LA, California. So this will be an awesome experience with all kinds of great Bitcoiners there, whether they are speakers Or just people attending and educating, there'll be education, there'll be workshops, there'll be a main stage obviously with panels and fireside chats, there'll also be a swan dome which will have deep dive sessions, there'll be a Bitcoin lab, there's all kinds of fun as well, there'll be, hoops involved, retro gaming zone, all kinds of stuff that you don't wanna miss out on. This will be a great experience for you, or potentially if you have a friend or a family member who is learning about Bitcoin, this is a great opportunity to bring them along and get" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00", "start": 60.42, "text": "And culture and attitudes that the Bitcoin community has. I'll be one of the hosts, and I'm looking forward to seeing you there, November 10th and 11th. Go to PacificBitcoin dot com, use code Livera for a discount. Are you a real Bitcoiner, and are you doing Bitcoin transactions? Well, Mempool dot space is the Bitcoin explorer for you. It's built by Bitcoiners for Bitcoiners. Now, as you saw at the recent Baltic Honey Badger speech by Simon and Wiz, they were explaining how Mempool is really graduating into being a multi-layer explorer Network also, so you can now search the Lightning Network on mempool dot space. Mempool dot space is also available over Tor and it's open source, so you can even run your own version of this. Now, mempool dot space has a community edition, which is freely available for the community, but there's also an enterprise edition as well that you can use if you are a builder in the space and you need certain specific products, you can talk to the team at mempool and you can sponsor those particular features or your own version of the explorer. So go and check it out over at Mempool dot space. Now, if it's Bitcoin hardware and security you're interested in, CoinKite dot com is the place to go. They are the creators of my favorite Bitcoin hardware signing device, the Coldcard. I like that this device is so versatile and it's also very reliable. And so once you're used to using it, it's really easy to set them up to do different features, such as if you need to apply a passphrase or if you need to use it as part of a multi-signature, and of course, one of my favorite features is the ability to use it in air Mode. So that's a really cool feature also. The cold card can be used by beginners, intermediate or advanced users. It has all kinds of different features and it-- you can really tune it for your level of security. Of course, CoinKite have a range of products. They've got OpenDimes, they've got Sats cards, they've got TapSigners, but of course, my favorite remains the cold card. So you can go and get that over at CoinKite dot com. Use code Laverre for a discount on your cold card. Now, for episode four Or the Alby, project. Now, most of you might know this as a browser extension, but they've also got a range of other products that we talk about here. But essentially, this is a really cool project that allows us to easily interact with Lightning on the web. Now, those of you who've been around in the space, you might recall an earlier project called Jool. So in a sense, this project, Alby, is drawing a lot of inspiration from that and using some of the newer standards and everything that allow us interoperability. So I'm really excited about what's happening I'm sure you'll enjoy this episode with Moritz. Moritz, welcome to the show. Hi, Stefan. So, I know you're working on Alby, and I've been playing around with Alby, I think it's really cool, and I wanted more people to hear about the story of Alby and a little bit about the project. So, firstly, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, just for listeners who don't know you?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "03:52", "start": 232.13, "text": "yeah, sure. So I'm working on, on Alby doing more like the, the project management side because I, I have more like a business background. I personally discovered Bitcoin back in 2013 when I wrote my master thesis about Bitcoin mining and, and project evaluation using different option and decision tree models. Then I, I joined a venture capital fund, but I really realized that somehow they don't really invest in Bitcoin companies, so I joined a spin-off. We were exploring Different use cases for Bitcoin, for example, how to pay a lawn mower using Lightning per square meter of grass cut, that was in two thousand nineteen, and, that's also the, the time when I got more, more, more into Lightning. I, for example, reached out to Vulgo Ventures because I thought that they do such a great job in supporting the whole Lightning ecosystem. I then joined Oleg on a more part-time basis doing some writing. Some research reports that also ended up in, in the arcane research report, because I, I build up a database of lightning projects, and that's also how I came across Alby" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:05", "start": 304.84, "text": "basically. Gotcha. And so you came across it, so that means someone had already started this project, I presume that's the developer? yeah, it's Umey," }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "05:16", "start": 315.74, "text": "or his real name is, is, is Michael. He was, I think as many of us, probably I am always super fascinated, about how we can create these, native payments on the internet, right? So he has a, a developer background, worked on different payment apps before, and then he also started contributing to Juul, a early browser extension for the Lightning Network, and then, after the project stopped, yeah, he initiated the work on, on Alby. that was, yeah, end of twenty twenty, in a really like community setup in one of these, Lightning hex prints back" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:01", "start": 361.11, "text": "then. Right, that's interesting as well, because I recall in the earlier days of Lightning going main net, Juul was very much like a predecessor to Alby, and I remember playing around with it, and at that time, people were using Juul as their little in-browser Lightning wallet, and they would do things like connect it to their Lightning node, and so people had like a Casa node Or other things like this, and it was very much like a predecessor to Alby's functionality. So I definitely saw a strong, inspiration between the two when I was playing around with Alby, and I've, I've been using it myself. But do you wanna just tell us a little bit about the reason behind making Alby? Why make this?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "06:38", "start": 398.22, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I mean, I totally agree. So, so, Alby is heavily inspired by Juul conceptual-wise, especially, because I think, the Will did a great job here, like building, His browser extension. but at some point he, the, the development, was stopped, although some like updates had to be deployed to keep it in the Firefox stores. And the idea of Jule, some of them keeps living on in Alby, and we can talk about that later on. But some, some parts we thought, okay, look, this is something maybe there are more specialized tools with that. So Jule was always also used for note- Management, but today we have also specialized tool for node management. So there's a, there's a difference there and, with, Juul, you could all, only, add your lightning or, yeah, lightning wallet that runs, on LND as compared to, I mean, other node applications or other wallets out there, and also here Alby, gives you a bit more" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:47", "start": 467.05, "text": "flexibility, of course. And so what we're talking about here is It's the ability to have our Bitcoin node and our Lightning node, and then connect a browser extension, and that's essentially what Alby is, that allows us to spend our Bitcoin over the Lightning network or even to receive. And one thing that I find really interesting is that there's all these different ways of interoperability or methods of having interoperability. We have things like Lightning addresses, we have things like QR codes, we have things like WebLN, and we're gonna get into all of these, things. So, I guess just high level in terms of Alby right now, what are the supported Lightning implementations? Is it LND only, or are there-- is there support for others coming?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "08:32", "start": 512.34, "text": "Yes, so it's, there are a bunch of already supported and, also, wanna support more on that, because in our opinion, like the, the Alby browser extension is the portal for you to the world of Lightning apps, right? And, we don't want to restrict our- users to just use one specific wallet or one specific implementation. So, you as a user, you can choose, several. And if we talk about like really the low level of, of, of lightning, the different lightning implementations, what right? right now we have LND, we also have Eclair, and we are currently working on, on a connector to Core Lightning. that is on our roadmap, and it should be possible, also because now there's a native plug-in available, with Komando for our PC commands. So this is one thing I think, and but also LDK, is super interesting, for example, to have a, a native node in your browser, connected to the Alby browser extension, for example. But often the problem is a bit here that all requires, still a lot of engineering work to get these things work. Working in a browser. So it would be awesome if we can sort of like team up with, with an expert from, yeah, from LDK or Core Lightning to, to get this going and to get it out into the hands of users actually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:01", "start": 601.03, "text": "Right. And so for users who are just following along, there are different Lightning implementations. The most popular one today is LND, Lightning Network Daemon by Lightning Labs, but some other popular ones are Electrum, another one is Core Lightning, or also previously known as C-Lightning by the Blockchain team, and then And LDK by the Spiral Bitcoin team. And so, I guess what we're talking about here is Alby is an easy way for consumers to just use that Lightning wallet and experience Lightning on the web. And so I think that's a really cool thing that Lightning is now enabling, and that's part of this vision that people have been talking about for so long, but now with Lightning, we have some of the technology and we have some of the ways to interconnect and make all of these things actually work in a way that's actually, the experience is becoming better and better and better over time. Sure. You know, years, if you went back years ago, it was, it was a lot harder and a lot, it was just a far different experience. Whereas now, I think the experience that's enabled with things like Alby and browser extensions is people can have that more seamless experience. So the idea is you're browsing, and then you may come across a paywall, and it may be five hundred sats or whatever, and you can pay that without having to like pull out your phone and scan the QR, as most of us are used to in the Lightning world, You want to just talk a little bit about what that experience is from a user experience, like what is the user experience of using Alby?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "11:25", "start": 685.39, "text": "Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:26", "start": 685.85, "text": "I" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "11:26", "start": 685.91, "text": "think this is a super critical point, especially when we talk to people who aren't into, not too tech savvy, not too much into Lightning. then, it all starts with, with the onboarding, but that we have to get right. Some people definitely, for example, want to connect their existing Lightning nodes that run at home, but the majority of, of, of people- People certainly they don't have a wallet yet or maybe they have just a mobile wallet, so we also want to take care of these. you can connect your Raspiblitz, your Umbrel, your custodial mobile Lightning wallet, for example, BlueWallet, Bitcoin Beach Or then especially for the people who don't yet have a Lightning wallet, you can also create a Alby Lightning wallet through the, through the extension and start playing around with, with Alby on, on different websites. And, what you can basically do is a bunch of things, you can pay, you can receive, you can log in to websites, and interact with different," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:33", "start": 752.71, "text": "applications, on the web. Right. And so there's all kinds of functionality. So One is this idea of LN URL auth, so that stands for authentication, and so the idea is, just for listeners, obviously you understand this, but the idea is that you can log into different online services. So there are different ones out there, I know one, there's a few examples, LN Markets, so that is like a Bitcoin trading site, but you can log in and out using LN auth. Another example is, Stacker News, so stacker dot news, you can log in with LN URL auth, and so this is something that Alby supports. So do you wanna About this idea of authentication using our browser extension or really our lightning node." }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "13:13", "start": 793.08, "text": "Yeah, so with Alby, we really want to make the, the interaction with web apps as seamless as possible, and that's why you can also use a Alby, or the Alby extension to, authenticate, on, on, on web apps, right? And it doesn't matter if it is the Alby wallet that you connected, as long as, Alenura- L off is supported by the connected wallet, then you can do that and you can log in with one click, you can log out with one click basically. And, this is like, yeah, I think a, a big benefit compared to before because you don't need a password to, and remember a password to log in. And, I'm super, super curious how to, in exploring how, how we can actually bring this to a, to a, to a, to a, to a wider audience and, and, and usage. Also for other apps, not just for like Lightning through the ESD" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:11", "start": 850.97, "text": "apps, yeah. I see. And so I think the other really interesting paradigm here is we're starting to see more and more interconnection, and we're seeing ways that these different Lightning wallets and applications can connect and work together. So historically, people might have had to have a different Lightning wallet or a different app for different purposes, whereas now it's, I think it's, it's shifting the paradigm now where you might have one Lightning wallet that you can- Interact with different apps, and I think there was a blog post you had as well which spelled some of this out, and I think it's an interesting way for people to understand the way Bitcoin or Lightning is shifting and the way it's going to become more accessible. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that interoperability, that concept of having one wallet but multiple apps?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "14:58", "start": 897.95, "text": "Yeah. So this is all based on, on an already open and global, payment network like the Lightning Network, and this is such, such a- A big improvement compared to today's payment rails that we see, for example, with, PayPal, where you can only interact with people who have PayPal. But, on Lightning, you can interact with people who have, Breeze, you can interact with people who, who have Phoenix, for example, because they all run on the same payment protocol. And this, and this is awesome. And now what we came out, recently with the, with the- The LB API and the idea behind that is really, we want to make payments accessible for everyone and, and, that's why we need these easy-to-use building blocks, such as an API for developers, so that they can create apps with this seamless payment experience. And today the problem is often, I don't know, like how many apps do you have, where you have Sats on, or how many accounts do you have where you deposited some Sats? At least I, I have several of them, right? And, and at some point you probably, you don't have an overview about that anymore. And wouldn't it be like, check, just nice if you can just have one wallet that is sort of interoperable with the different applications out there, and you can connect it. So what we thought, okay, the goal of this API, API is really to solve exactly this, that, we need to move away from this send and receive use- Experience or to move actually to the send and receive user experience and away from this deposit and withdraw model that many Lightning apps currently implement. and also on the other side, make it easier for developers at the same time to include Lightning and Bitcoin payment functionalities into, into their, apps. So it's, it's definitely a bit of a paradigm shift that we want to achieve here, but I think this improves greatly the user" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:06", "start": 1025.91, "text": "experience. I see. So As an example, instead of having an account where you deposit and, and withdraw, you might be referring to this idea that you can stream Sats, or you can just continuously stream a small amount of Sats, depending on what you're doing, depending on what the use case is. And I noticed that also in the app as well, so in the extension in Alby, I notice on some websites, well, in general, it gives you that option of, hey, do you wanna just set a budget and then just let the website automatically pull from your wallet up to a certain level? I'm curious, what's the reasoning behind that idea?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "17:40", "start": 1060.47, "text": "Yeah, so it's a bit like we have to differentiate here a bit, because there's the, there's the, the wallet API that you can be used, to include Lightning functionality into a mobile app, into a web app, and then there's also WebLN that serves actually a similar purpose, but this is more for the, for the, interface between the Alby extension and the web app, but, yeah. On, on a very high level, the functionalities are very similar because what you can do is you can connect your app easily to this application either through this API from Alby or through, a WebLN, right? And, for example, for this, for this API, how this works is basically you can now bring your Alby wallet to another, Lightning app, so it becomes basically a multi-purpose wallet suddenly, so, and, and the app that, that you want to connect Connector asks you if you want to add your Alby wallet account, like similar to log in via Facebook, for example, and then, and then you can connect your wallet to that app. And it's, it's all based on the, on the O Auth protocol, so it's an open standard, in the industry, and this also ensures interoperability and with a also minor login effect for, for, for web apps at the same time, they don't have to take care of, of like node management, account management of- Users, because this is basically like outsourced to Alby in this case, because the user now has a wallet that is like, \"Yeah, okay, I can bring my own wallet to any other app.\" And regarding the allowances or the budgets feature that you just mentioned, this is one feature that is also particularly available in the, in the Alby browser extension, and, combined with WebLN, basically you can really achieve these, one-click payments. Compared to, rather cumbersome payments when, when you have to look for your credit card details, for example, or you have to look for your smartphone to scan a QR code, initiate payments and so on. But with these, one-click payments, and the potential here is, is, is huge, right? You can also, for example, just like scroll through a website and per scroll, what, what you do, you can initiate a payment, either like send a payment or just receive a payment, or you can also- Also do that time based, and this just works because with, with WebLN, it's just a different set of connection basically between a web app and a wallet, you can have these, these programmatic interactions suddenly." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:21", "start": 1221.34, "text": "I see. And so it enables this whole new possibility around people monetizing online, because now There's this, it's really smooth and slick. And so as Bitcoiners know, it, Bitcoin is this open network, anybody can join it, you can just earn satoshis online for doing things. And then now this idea is that we have a connected wallet that really smooths the interface online, so it makes it really simple to send and receive without having to pull out a, a phone wallet or, or log into things, you just have an Alby extension. And what you could do, I mean, depending on how you manage things, but you might have a smaller amount that you have Have just, you know, in your Alby wallet, and you're using that for this back and forth spending. And I think, I think it's really interesting and perhaps underrated, or people don't really understand this part yet, because it is just that early in terms of, Bitcoin and Lightning adoption. and so I'm excited for this. I think it's really cool that we can connect up our wallet and even link to our own node. So for example, I can link my own BTC Pay, and let's say I earn in on that, and then I wanna browse on the Sunbrowsing, I can pay for things, I can buy things straight away. And so I think it's a great demonstration for people of just how powerful Lightning can be, and how the overall ecosystem is being built out. And I think, I think it's really cool because it's in a very open source, open ethos kind of, manner. So that's really cool. I think that, those are some of the main things that I'm excited about. so with, with Alby, what's the structure of this? Like, is it a, is it just a Thinking, what is it? So" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "22:01", "start": 1320.99, "text": "the Alby browser extension itself is open source, it's, it's, yeah, a very like community driven project. we are part of the Bitcoin design community, we have a Slack channel there, we have biweekly community calls where people come together, tell what they've done, we showcase things there, talk about our plans, but it's, it's also the case that, that there is a, there, there's an official organization behind Alby in the meantime. Because in order to operate in a sustainable way, you also need to contribute back to the community, right? You can't always take from them, but you also need to give them something back. So we need also need to see how we can create value, with Alby that is then like coordinated within this organization and distributed back to its contributors. So it's, it's a, it's part of, it's really like both sides." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:56", "start": 1376.33, "text": "Gotcha. Yeah. And so of course, I'm sure many listeners are thinking Also, hey, what about privacy and security ramifications? So let's get into some of those aspects. Also, I know, let's start with security. So obviously there are a lot of browser hacks and browser things going on. I'm curious what can be done about that, in terms of this extension being able to control your wallet. Do you have any thoughts, for listeners out there on the security of the use of browser extension to control our lightning node? Lightning wallets." }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "23:31", "start": 1411.13, "text": "I think it's important to understand here that, that the Alby browser extension itself is a, a fully client-side application if you connect it to your own Lightning wallet. So and, and, we know that is, it's, it's a pretty, it's, it's a tricky topic, so, so that's also why we, for example, right now we make sure that it comes without any tracking software, that is important, and there is no connection to any like Alby organization Or whatever organization in, in the back, if you use it with your, your own, Lightning wallet. So hence there is no data exchange with us, and what you only have to do here, in this case, you only trust the software with your data, right? And also, that's also a reason why Alby is open source to give people the chance to review the code, for example. But there's certainly always some trust involved, and the trust model, I would say, is actually very comparable To your mobile wallet, for example, or to your app that you connect to your remote Lightning node or the node software itself, right? You always have to trust something, and, and, and, and, and give access to, some, very valuable data. and this is, this is the same also with the Alby extension. And all of these, like the mobile wallets also, they all have, access to wallet credentials." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:57", "start": 1497.06, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Have you thought about upgrading your Bitcoin security and how often does that come up for you? Unchained Capital can help you move to multi-signature. When you do multi-signature, you are having your coins secured using multiple keys. And so as an example, you might have two different hardware devices stored in different locations and Unchained would hold the third key so they can co-sign for you. Now if you need help setting this up, they've got a concierge onboarding program so you can go to the website. They can set you up over a video call, they can then teach you how to withdraw your coins from the exchange or out of your single signature setup into a multi-signature setup, and they guide you through the process, so they help you ensure that you don't shoot yourself in the foot. So this can help you give you that peace of mind. So if you're interested, go to unchained dot com slash concierge, use the code Livera for a discount there. Are you interested in Bitcoin mining? Brains dot com is the site for you. They offer auto-tuning mining firmware. This Known as BrainsOS Plus, that's the name of the software. You can install this firmware on your Bitcoin mining ASIC and you can improve efficiency by as much as twenty-five percent. Now, you can mine on any pool or point your hash rate towards BrainsPool and you get zero percent pool fees. Now, they have a range of supported models, so go and check on the website. In the pipeline, they've got WhatsMiner and AntMiner, X nineteen models coming, and they've also got a really cool analytics dashboard. So you can go to there on the mining insights page Ability calculator and see all kinds of specialist mining statistics that are really handy for you. So that website is brains dot com, that's b r a i i n s dot com, and finally bitbo dot io. This is a Bitcoin homepage, so you can set this either as your homepage or perhaps as a bookmark that you can periodically check. So if you need to get a view of the Bitcoin ecosystem, whether that is the price, don't forget to zoom out and click for log scale mode, but you can see things like Bitcoin network statistics, Lightning network Statistics. You can see the sat per dollar figure so that you can, do that mental maths and value things in satoshis. You can see the inflation rate, you can see comparison versus normie assets like GBTC and what the premium is, you can see the projected Bitcoin halving dates. So this is a great u-resource that you can use. Don't forget to bookmark this site, it's b i t b o dot i o. And now back to the show with Moritz. Of course. Right. And so I guess the answer then from a privacy perspective is if you're con Connecting it to your own wallet, Alby doesn't know what you're doing, right? It's your own wallet talking to your own browser extension, and in the security case, well, I think that's just going to browser security. So it's a question about how secure browser extensions and browser security is. Obviously, that's a, that's a hot topic. There's often browser vulnerabilities and exploits and things, but nevertheless, it may be something that people can choose to mitigate that risk by, let's say, if it's possible to do macarons or only authorizing A certain amount of value to be spent, or otherwise, obviously limiting the amount that's held in that Lightning wallet. So if it's connected to your Lightning node and your Lightning wallet, limit the amount that's held in that. Obviously, don't be putting your whole stack in there. Obviously, this is just-- this should be the spending money, or should be seen as that. But yeah, and I think it gives, I think a Bitcoin experience for the web that's really, really slick. And so I think for some people, that's worthwhile. That's, you know, they're, they certain level of risk because I want this convenience and this experience, and over time, as that experience builds out and becomes better and better, then it may become, more of a typical thing that people do and they accept a certain level of risk there. I mean, in the same way that, you know, people might store credit card credentials in their, in some password manager or things like that, that, you know, of course, credit card information could also be compromised or could also be stolen or hijacked. So, I, I think the e- Ecosystem and the industry will evolve responses and security in response to some of these, but it's interesting to see which way that goes. Also, wanted to chat about the WordPress plugin. So I saw recently You released a WordPress plugin giving a Lightning Paywall, so can you explain what this is and how it works?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "29:19", "start": 1758.55, "text": "Yeah, this is a bit like the other side, of Alby. So there is the Alby browser extension side, that is really the idea, okay, how can we make it easier for users to spend and, and receive Sats on the web as a very consumer-driven project, whereas the WordPress plugin is really, like really targets website operators, developers, publishers, creators. and here, our goal is also to make it easier for them to, like, to receive these sats and to be able to, to, to monetize their content. And, that's why we, we, also published the, the Bitcoin Lightning Publisher. That's the, that's the name of the WordPress plugin. And it follows very much also the, like, the similar idea of the Alby browser extension, because you have a very flexible backend where you can connect different, wallets, like, like our- I'll be like, your LND node or the BTC pay server, for example, or if you run a LND hub or LND bits, you can, you can connect that as well. or just if you have a Lightning address, you can just plug it in. And then, you can, you can activate it. it has then different, let's say, more like front and facing functionalities. you can, activate a donation widget, for example. You can also activate a, a pay- Paywall, on all types of content, and, and this interesting part of the-- about these paywalls is that they, they have different functionalities, and the idea is also a bit we want to give people the chance to experiment a bit, because, yeah, we are still in, in, in such an early state where we don't really know, okay, in which regard do paywalls actually convert users to, to paying users, right? So there's, for example, a paywall that can be disabled after a- X hours, when the article is published or can be enabled, after, after X hours, when the article was published or after a total amount, or a certain amount was collected. So all these like different, different, functionalities of a paywalls are available, and, then other things as well, right? So you can quickly add a Lightning MetaTag to your WordPress website. So in this case, if you have a, have a MetaTag, you wouldn't need a payment plugin, for example. So that's especially interesting for people who have not so much, developer experience. Don't know how to add a payment plugin to their website, what all they need now is a Lightning address, add this Lightning meta tag into their HTML code, with the, with the WordPress plugin, it's just a click, and then it's integrated and all people coming to your website, using Alby the extension, can now send you Sats on a website. That's one thing, and, what I also find very interesting is, for example, that you can with, with this WordPress plugin And you can also add a, a value tag to your RSS feed if you use this, if you use WordPress in general for, hosting your podcast." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:38", "start": 1957.58, "text": "Yeah, there's a lot of functionality and things that can be built out here, and I think the other part that's really cool is you're making it accessible for a lot of people, right? Because as many people know, or maybe some people don't know, WordPress powers a massive number of web pages on the internet. It's something like thirty-seven percent or something around forty percent percent of the internet is powered by WordPress, and if, you know, we're talking about maybe just under two billion people in some sense, or maybe we're, we're talking in the hundreds of millions of people who could just install this plug-in and boom, already, already now, you know, start taking payment in Bitcoin to paywall their articles or their website. And in terms of getting a Lightning address, there are ways to do that too, so you can run BTC Pay server and get a Lightning address out of that. There are some, you know, K- I see exchanges that even allow you to host, I, I believe CoinCorner in the UK, allow you to get a Lightning address. There are other ways that you can get it through somebody else. So there's all these ways that you can set up a Lightning address, and now you can just get paid into that for your content. It's just that the world doesn't realize this yet, and it's really early," }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "33:43", "start": 2022.99, "text": "right? Exactly, yeah. But I mean, just like if you look a bit back, one or two years ago, where, yeah, back then you still had to run your own" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "33:57", "start": 2037.0, "text": "You know, if you go on lightningaddress dot com, for example, you see tons of them that already provide a lightning address, and, with a WordPress plugin like, like the Bitcoin Lightning Publisher or this, this, this MetaTech functionality, it's super easy to get started monetizing your content, on, on, on Lightning, right? even easier than adding a PayPal widget to your website." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:20", "start": 2059.61, "text": "Yeah, and without all of the censorship that comes with PayPal, because I'm sure there are people know, they've seen on the news, or, you know, or even- And recently there was one with, Eric Jolli, he's a well-known libertarian creator in the comic book space, and so he was starting his own comic book thing, and he was getting locked out from all of his own money by PayPal. But now in Lightning and Bitcoin world, we can set up, people can set up their own Lightning nodes, and they can set up their own infrastructure and just not get stopped, and it's incredible. So I think what we, as a community, have to do is get better about, you know, trumpeting and making sure people know about" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:57", "start": 2097.34, "text": "I, I guess, I don't wanna get overly enthusiastic, but I think we have to also recognize it's early and these things still have to be built out in a way that's easy and nice UX and, in, in a way that all plays together nicely. But the cool thing is, in Bitcoin, there's an ethos of this interoperability of, of FOSS, open source culture, and so we're really seeing that. And so I think we are starting to see some of that now, really the interoperability and the way these different pieces can connect together and play together to make a very A compelling way of doing payments online." }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "35:31", "start": 2131.16, "text": "That's true, yeah. And I mean, you, you talk about a very, very important topic, and I think maybe that we should also invest, invest a bit on that because that's also a reason why we not only target no coiners with the Alby extension, but also a lot of thoughts go into, how can we make the life of, web, developers, for example, how can we, make that easier for them? so that they don't have to, interact or learn how to build something on such a low level as, as LND or, or, or see Lightning runs or core Lightning runs. So that's why, for example, we want to also add more functionality into the Alby browser extension that exposes different features to developers, and to interact with, with, with, with the user's wallet, for example, and, that's why we also heavily work Working on, on WebLN, what's the Lightning Web standard, on, on improved this specification that was also char- started by, by Bill and Juul, by Will and Juul back then, and now also continued with Alby, but in a, in a bigger context, more, more people join, more wallets integrate, WebLN, for example, and it's important that we make the life of developers easier, because only then we see more usage of, of Lightning on the web. And, more people come because they, they like this, this application that I built that there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:03", "start": 2222.62, "text": "Yeah, and there's so many points of interoperability, or so many ways this could apply if there are creators, content creators online who want to make content, and then the people who wanna pay them, and if it's really slick and easy to get started, then we're slowly, we're building out that network effect, we're, we're growing the flywheel of Bitcoin and Lightning, and so I think it's really cool to see, I'm excited to see it happen. And, I'm also curious as well if you could just explain a little bit about the podcasting two point o's to-- Oh, sorry, actually one other question. So, is there any connection with Elsatt as well with what you're working on with Alby?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "37:42", "start": 2262.19, "text": "yeah, there is. It's also a bit related to developer ecosystem and building blocks, that we, that we want to support with Alby, for the Lightning Network, because we, we recently published a showcase The, Insatgram, it's like, like Instagram, just with sets. So you can buy and sell images for sets, you can, and, and, and send it directly to your own wallet. So the sets don't, they don't go over the platform, but they are really, the payments are peer-to-peer, but the files that are the pictures in, in this case, they are uploaded to, to a web platform basically. and this is, it's a, it's a very nice showcase because it in- Includes different building blocks of Lightning, so you have WebLN there for one-click payments with the Alby browser extension. You have LNURL there with Lightning addresses, from, from different providers, all interoperable to receive payments, because someone, someone, someone like the payer, needs to know where they sent the payment to. And then you have also ElsA there, and, this showcase is open source and it combines all of these and it's- It was, was a nice work actually by Quinten, Dananjay, and, and Bumi, I think. And what Elsart is, is doing here, it basically serves as a, both as an authentication, as well as as a payment mechanism here. So you, you pay for a, picture, on, on Instagram, for example, and you get an authentication token that allows you to request this resource from a website. So in this case, it's, it's the picture. And the interesting thing here Here is that you can assign different attributes or capabilities to this token that you get, through Elset, so for example, you can also then give this token to another person, this person can access the same, resource on the web, and it could be a picture, it could be a video, like anything that this specific application with an Elset server basically, yeah, stores or, or provides, right? And I think Actually, in, in, in some, some ways, you could see it also a bit like an, like an NFT, like that, it's a token that gives you some certain rights, it can also expire, and there are very, very interesting applications, out there that you can do with, that you can, use or create with Elsåt, basically, for example, and that's why, that's why we also bring out this in, in setgram showcase to just show people how How far we have come with Lightning and motivate more to build on Lightning, right? So you can, for example, also serve, videos with ads, you can serve podcasts with or without ads, with special scenes or, or not, and this all works with Elset, and you don't have to reveal, your personal identity because you have, you have this token that, that, you, you receive when you paid it, basically. So it's, it's a, it's a great tool, and I really hope to see much more of these showcases out there, or even maybe someone who improves, and keeps, working on inside ground." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:03", "start": 2463.44, "text": "Fantastic. And so with Elsad, I think it's interesting that this, I, I believe it was, it came out, off the top of my head, I think it was maybe twenty twenty or maybe twenty nineteen when it came out, and the Lightning Labs team and Lau Lau were talking about it, and it was obviously it was very early then, and now we're starting to see some actual, oh, wow, here's some like real practical, you can use There's all these ideas out there, and it maybe takes time for one of them to get picked up and put into a project, and then it's actually usable, like in a way that's kind of, I guess, visible for the average user, because I guess when it starts, it seems like, okay, it's, it's like a developer thing or like hardcore Bitcoin people who are coding away and doing some stuff, but then over time, it becomes practical and accessible for the masses, and hopefully, we're seeing this direction happen with more and more, stuff around Lightning as well and yeah, let's chat a bit about podcasting two point o because I saw you came out with a, it's called Saturn. So do you wanna tell us a little bit about that?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "42:05", "start": 2524.7, "text": "Yeah, so Saturn was basically born because out of the reason that, Alby, the Alby Lightning Wallet, is also a, a wallet for podcasters, right? You can receive boosts, you can receive streams, you can also receive booster grams in your Alby Lightning Wallet, so it has quite some, some, quite some features there. But, Here is, in general, like if you receive streams, then you suddenly end up with, I don't know, like fifty payments of one to two hundred satz or so, right? And then you pretty quickly lose the overview. So we, we, we, we are thinking, okay, how can we present this list of transactions in a, in a, in a nicer way? And on the other side, how can we use, make use of the Alby Wallet API? And then we also looked at the Podcaster Industry today, and what you see here is also quite interesting, because today as a podcaster, you can actually only analyze what episodes your listeners are consuming, and the reason is that you can only measure downloads, and listeners for each episodes of an RSS ba-based podcast, but you don't know actually how your listeners are consuming one specific episode of your podcast. And that's, that's why we built, Saturn And it's, I think also Rainier did a great job here, and I think also users should keep in mind that it's still an early prototype, but it's a data analytics tool, and you get, really actionable insights into the podcast performance. So if you run a value for value podcast, using the Alby Lightning wallet, what you can do now is you can connect, you can go, on, on Saturn, you can connect your, Alby account, then Alby, or- Saturn gets, gets the transaction data out of your Alby wallet and nicely displays it so you see, who are your main contributors, for example. you also see live boostergrams, and then as a, as a podcast in particular, it's also interesting to see, because you learn if listeners are actually skipping over your episodes intros or your second midroll, for example, or what sections do they actually like in particular and whatnot. And this is possible because with Podcasting 2.0, you could actually now link value streams like Bitcoin-based micropayments to information streams, like your, your podcast or the podcast download. And if you combine these, you can bring exactly these insights, to podcasters. and we are basically decoupling the podcast statistics that are just bound to one specific app. And, and, gathered by them and make it available and interoperable to, through overall, podcast, or like value enabled podcast apps and make it particular, available then for, for, for the podcaster. So you also now, also own basically the, the stats to your own podcast, yeah, and we will see how it turns out. It's a super interesting space, definitely." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:24", "start": 2723.81, "text": "Right. And yeah, and I think it's really interesting because the idea- Is that with podcasting two point oh, people are streaming a certain amount of sats every minute or so, and they can periodically boost, and so you can see, oh, when were the boosts happening or when were the streams less, and I guess that's also kind of how you're doing that idea of understanding where, where is the drop off in terms of listeners? So yeah, I think it's interesting to see all of these things. so I guess in terms of your outlook on lightning just generally, I'm curious, what do you see for lightning generally, or what kinds of things do" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "45:57", "start": 2757.12, "text": "So yeah, so if you ask me what, what, what we, what we are missing on, on Lightning is still, we need many, many more, applications out there, right? We need, we need more, exchanges that include, Lightning withdrawals to make the, the onboarding easier, or maybe even deposits to make the off-ramps easier because now, this what we see in podcasting, we often get the question, okay, how do I get my first sat into the app to get started supporting podcasters? casters on the other side ask us, okay, what can I do with Sats? so we need to provide also at some point nice off-ramps or, if we don't have nice off-ramps, we need just many more, websites, apps that accept Lightning, payments. And, so we, so we need, and that's what we look, look after, especially at Alby, is we need a way more, yeah, active developer ecosystem, and there are also what we have to say Quite, quite interesting initiatives already out there. So like with Bold Dot Fun, for example, then or Plablab, they, they, they create hackathons. It's super important to get a community of developers going, and, and, and to have more, yeah, people joining this system to build apps, to, to convince people to use Sats on the web. And I can definitely see that, especially in the creator, area, if you build things, people and really improve The lives of people, for example, with this Lightning MetaTech, we see that on YouTube, for example, you can include that now on, on your, on your YouTube channel, a Lightning address, Alby picks it up automatically and, you can s-support this, this, this, this podcast, and it's so easier. It's, it's a peer-to-peer payment. It's like you don't pay thirty percent to YouTube, so more, more sats end up in your wallet, and, and Alby comes with A lot of, like, lot more of these integrations, SoundCloud, for example, on GitHub, Medium, also on Twitter, and these all, these, these things, they all improve the lives of people, they are super simple to integrate, you basically don't lose anything if you, if you do that, and, and if you ask people to support you, they actually will support you, right? And I think this is what we, what we see, I think a lot of more, more publishers, creators find their ways to Lightning because it's ten times better experience for them to compare payment systems today." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:31", "start": 2910.74, "text": "And I like the idea you just mentioned there about being able to read a lightning address just on, on the web, right? So, so what you're referring to there is this idea that people put like the lightning emoji and then the lightning address. And so then you're saying Alby can just pick that up and then the browser, the user who wants to donate, they can see that lightning address and like straight away just tip them like that. That's what you're referring to, right?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "48:55", "start": 2934.95, "text": "Exactly. Yes." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:56", "start": 2935.96, "text": "Yeah. And so I think that's really interesting, and it's like my friend Rusty over at Blockstream, working on Core Lightning and the Lightning protocol, he mentions this idea that, you know, he, he won't necessarily be able to predict, you know, he said this years ago to me, he was saying, \"We won't be able to predict what is the popular use for this thing, but we'll just kind of be coding away and making this thing, and then eventually we'll just see this use case just blow up out of nowhere.\" And so, you know, I think that's kind Address just even in their profile somewhere, and then anyone can just donate straight away to that without even having to, you know, without any real friction, because if they're running Alby or something like it, like let's say Alby gets competitors in the future, and there are, you know, lots of other extensions all doing the same kind of thing, and we've got this interoperable Lightning Web Payments going on, and ideally it's done in a non-custodial way where let's say people are hooking it up with their own Lightning node, now we've got this non-custodial interoper Interface all around the web, and I think that's a really cool vision for maybe potentially where this is going." }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "50:03", "start": 3002.84, "text": "Yeah, and it makes the life of people so much easier to receive payments. And I think this is a crucial part if we want Lightning to, to succeed or, or just to get a quicker adoption is we can't only rely on, on exchanges, integrating Lightning, we also need to give users a chance to earn, Sats, on the internet and a light- Address is a helps because, people can get quicker on, on, on, on a Lightning wallet, can distribute their Lightning address to apps or to the, or put it on their own website and, and earn some SATs. and I'm particularly bullish about, web apps, for example, that, come with a earning mechanism, so that use SATs, for example, to incentivize their usage. So, for example, they reward Reward you for posting great content, they reward you for giving tips, but of course, you, you, they also ask for payments, because you consume all the content on, on these sites. But I think you, as an, as an app, we need to think, or as an app developer, we need to think, okay, how can we create this, even if it's just a tiny little economy around one particular app? But this is how you, as a, as an app developer, you can, yeah, more easily- Really, onboard new users because you don't rely on users already having Sats in their wallet, right? Because you give them a chance to earn Sats on your own app. And, I'm, I'm, I'm sure we see a lot of more of these type of apps in the future because it makes a user acquisition so, so much easier." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:44", "start": 3103.87, "text": "Yeah, fascinating to think about. I think having that built out ecosystem of places where people can spend Sats, but I think importantly to your point, earn Sats, because I think that's probably also why we're not necessarily Spending using Lightning on some of the sites as an example, Bitrefill and things like that, but maybe that's because not a lot of people can earn on Lightning, and maybe once they could earn directly into Lightning, well then it's only natural for them to actually start spending in using Lightning also. so I think that's an interesting direction as well. any other thoughts just around Bitcoin, where you think it's going, any, speculations or things you wanna share? So yeah," }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "52:21", "start": 3141.43, "text": "and I'll be mine. We, we are really interested in building things. Affects everyone in, in the industry, but it's, it's, it's a great time now for us to, to build things and, and be prepared for, for, for the years ahead. I think it's, it's never too late get, getting into this field, especially like starting, starting the, the learning journey with, with, with lightning and an open source project. from what, what I can tell, I, I also started contributing to open source projects, you learn a lot, especially if you have a And there are so many, and communities around or, or projects that are open source within Lightning or the bigger Bitcoin ecosystem. Everyone who wants to get started, I think it's, that's the right time right now because you're not distracted by anything else like price or so. And it doesn't matter if you're a developer, if you're a designer, from what I can tell at least with the Alby team, everyone, if you're a marketer, if you want to create content, you're very much welcome, just like let us know No, but I, I guess there are tons of others open source projects that, that are, that are happy if they have contributors like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:35", "start": 3215.48, "text": "like this. Fantastic. Well, listeners go and find them. The website is getalby, g e t a l b y dot com. There's a browser extension, there's a WordPress plugin, all kinds of things. Moritz, where can people find you and any other places to find you guys?" }, { "speaker": "moritz", "time": "53:51", "start": 3230.65, "text": "so yeah, we are also part of the Bitcoin Design community. We have a, Slack channel there. It's called Lightning Browser. Extension channel on Twitter, we also call that, called Get Alby there, or if you go on Telegram, we are at, t dot m e slash get alby. and yeah, happy to see, happy to welcome more people there, be cool. Thanks for joining me, Moritz. Thanks. Again, was, was, was a great experience." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:17", "start": 3256.81, "text": "I hope you enjoyed the show. I'm bullish on Lightning and interoperability. I hope you are also, and so maybe you wanna try some of these technologies out and let us know I don't know what you think or tweet out about your thoughts, also, I'm curious to hear what you think. I also see a lot of the comments coming through on podcasting two point oh when people are boosting, so thanks for those comments, everyone, and the support. You can get the show notes at stephanelivera dot com slash four one two. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }