{ "episodeId": "SLP551", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "ben_carman": { "name": "Ben Carman", "role": "guest", "tag": "BEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:01", "start": 0.74, "text": "Hi everyone, you're watching Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Swann dot com. What's Next for Bitcoin? We talk about various soft fork ideas and development philosophies and ideas in Bitcoin, and today I'm speaking with Ben Carman from Mutiny Wallets, so he rejoins me to share some really interesting perspectives on Bitcoin protocol development, what are some Bitcoin's biggest challenges, soft forks, covenants, what are some of the different categories of upgrades, what counts as a big- Bitcoin Layer 2, and of course, we get into some discussion on what he's working on, which is Mutiny Wallet, and we talk a little bit about whether this represents a new hybrid era for Bitcoin wallets. I'm sure you'll enjoy this discussion with Ben Carman" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "00:59", "start": 58.96, "text": "Ben, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me again Stefan. Good to, good to talk to you again. It's been a minute." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:05", "start": 64.7, "text": "Yeah, it's been a while, lots of things happening. I know you are plugging away, working hard on Mutiny Wallet, as well as, you know, commentating on a few things happening in the space. yeah, I had a chance to play around with Mutiny as well, we'll get to that. but let's, let's first start with talking a little bit about what you see as Bitcoin's biggest- You know, challenges on one side and opportunities on the other. Do you wanna just start on the-- Let's start on the challenges side. What do you see as some of the, the challenges that we're, you know, as an ecosystem that we're facing?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:34", "start": 93.65, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think it's always been like, even since day one, it's always been scaling, like, you know, everything. I, there's a famous post by Hal Finney where he's like, \"Oh, there's gonna be like a million Bitcoin banks,\" and it's like, you know, Lightning paper came out in like 2015, so it's almost like nine years now, people have been working on Lightning, and it's been-- I mean, Lightning I think is a huge success, but I think people are now kind of realizing it's not just like You know, just use Lightning and it fixes everything. it's a, you know, incremental solution and there's more things we need to do. And so I think a lot of people are kind of realizing that in this last like year or two and, It's evoked a lot of emotions, I guess, like some people are like, \"Oh, we were sold a lie,\" and like, you know, Bitcoin devs are liars and scammers, versus the other half is like, \"Oh, you know, this is-- we all knew this already, it's just like, you know, welcome to reality kind of thing.\" And then, you know, all of this is being compounded by, like, you know, we're trying to like use the chain most efficiently, and then you have the Taproot wizard guys just like putting four megabyte JPEG Opinion, but it's a, it's a shit show, and, I don't know, I think basically we're kind of coming, coming to a head now. Like, you recently had, I forget his name, like Render Code or something like that on, Brandon to talk about, all the soft fork stuff or, stuff like that. You know, we're trying to like- I think the conversation now's kind of moved to like, at least a lot of people are recognizing we do need maybe a soft fork to try to like help these things, but, there's the other crowd of ossification stuff that doesn't want to and all that stuff. So I think a lot of our challenges is like almost more social than technical, of just like- You know, we need to come to like a social consensus of like, what's the next move? And, you know, it's just politicking instead of like, you know, sadly not writing the code, but like kind of figuring out what exactly is the right code to write, kind of thing. So, that's kind of hard, but it's, you know, slow and steady." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:33", "start": 212.89, "text": "On the social al-element, I wanna put this to you, I think you'd have some interesting thoughts. I saw, and actually this is based-- shout out to Neil Woodfine, he" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:47", "start": 226.92, "text": "He had this kind of ossificationist view, which is basically don't change Bitcoin unless it's like gonna, literally gonna die. Then you had the kind of, the conservatives who are sort of like, you know, we want some change, but sort of slow and steady, be safe about it. Then you had the kind of Bitcoin progressives, the kind of people who are like more radical about what changes they want, and then you kind of had the sort of shitcoiner people who are sort of like just wanna enable anything and everything that enables, you know, shitcoins, and, you know I'm curious, do you sort of, where do you see that taxonomy? Do you think it's accurate or inaccurate, or do you have any comments on that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "04:23", "start": 262.86, "text": "Yeah, I saw that tweet. I thought it was, I thought it was very accurate. There's like, basically like those four camps. Like, you have like the Taproot Wizards, like, let's activate CAT and this and that, and it's like, oh, that's, those get scary if you activate all that stuff. But yeah, and then there's the ossification camp, it's like, don't touch Like, you know, we definitely need some change, and we can't just like wait around for ten years to like pick a change because, you know, Bitcoin, you know, if Bitcoin is worth like a trillion dollars tomorrow, like soft forks probably aren't happening anymore. It's just like be- being able to activate things just comes that much harder the bigger the system gets. So I think like we do have a time limit on these things, so I kind of leave to the progressive sense in that case, but like I don't wanna activate anything like, you know, we need to be somewhat targeted in what we activate, but, Yeah, I just curious, I think it, it's, it comes like a lot of, like when you got into Bitcoin thing, 'cause like, if you look in like the history of Bitcoin soft forks, there was basically one every like six months to a year up until SegWit. It was just a normal thing, like, \"Oh, new Bitcoin core update, there might be a soft fork up in, in it now.\" Now it's like, you know, if you even open a poll request to Bitcoin core for a soft fork, it's like a news event, which is" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "05:43", "start": 343.2, "text": "You know, so it, it makes me like question, like, you know, is, well, SegWit the outlier? Like, would it, if we didn't have this, block size war and all the history, would we have just been having, like, you know, still soft forks every six months to a year up until now, would we have like all these fancy things? Or was that like, were we just being like naive children, just activating random things, and we got humbled during, SegWit, and now we like learned we need to take this time I, I, there, I do think there is a middle ground. Like, I think like, you know, four years for every upgrade is kind of what we're at now, and that's-- I don't think that's gonna work if we, go that slow because, like I said, there's this time limit on, on, when we can activate things, I think, and if we wait too long, then it's like That we're, you know, all these software folks are trying to make self custody easier and cheaper and, like, you know, more scalable for end users, and if we like, you know, if we stop softwareing today, frankly, like, you know, most users won't be able to use self custody, self custodial Bitcoin, and then, like, you know, that's not the dream we want of Bitcoin, and, you know, it, it can hurt its properties in the end where, you know, if everyone's in centralized custodians, then inflation can happen, you know" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:57", "start": 417.28, "text": "So I take it then you, s-it sounds like you agree with, let's say, Red and Code, okay, Brandon Black, his view on if we don't get, say, Covenant or maybe in the longer term future a block size increase, that may restrict the number of people who can self-custody Bitcoin, and therefore we should consider a Covenant soft fork. Is that basically where you're at, or how would you categorize yourself, or how would you-- Yeah, I think that." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "07:24", "start": 443.86, "text": "I think that's just like the general understanding of most Bitcoin devs It's like, it's like either that, like either we, we know like we can improve current systems by soft forks, otherwise it's like we basically just have to like invent completely new things out of the blue that, like, no one's thought of for the last ten years. Like, you know, maybe something like BitVM enables like a trustless two-way Peck side chain or something, but like, you know, side chains still aren't like Really weighs the scale, it's more just like pushing the, you know, it's like kicking the can a little bit. You're just like creating another blockchain, which is like, you know, the whole thing we're trying to solve is blockchains on scale, so like, why are we creating more blockchains? But, yeah, it's, you know, maybe some other fancy stuff comes out of the blue that we didn't, didn't expect. But, you know, at the end of the day, it's like Our current understanding is we kind of need soft forks, and, you know, if we're just gonna like sit on our hands, just like waiting for someone to invent a new protocol on top of Bitcoin, like it's, it's not like a, you know, long term thing, it's just like hoping, hopium kind of thinking. So, I don't think that's very advisable. And, unless it's just like, you know, if Bitcoin is just to you, it's just like, I keep like my, you know, ten Bitcoin in cold storage, and I never touch People to transact like that, we definitely need more scaling solutions if we wanna do it in a self-custodial way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "08:46", "start": 525.67, "text": "Yeah, and so I guess there's a few different categories of things people can talk about, as you mentioned, the soft forks, and people, I guess, talk about different categories, and that's, that's my understanding of it. I'm curious to hear your understanding. So let me just try to spell out some of the different categories I see people talking about, and we'll see. So I guess in one category you've got sort of the, the And maybe someone like John Carvalho might be, you know, pro-blocksize increase, maybe not now, but in the future, let's say something like that. but of course, that can also be controversial because people might be like, \"Hey, if you raise the block size, you're just gonna get more inscriptions and spam on the chain per se.\" Another category is, let's say, covenants, right? So, any prevout and check template verify or TX hash, something in that category that allows, you know, a, a restraint on the next output is sort Code or Brandon explains that, and maybe in another category you've got this kind of zk zero knowledge, either optimistic rollup or some kind of zero knowledge, category. I know someone like, Lau Lau from Lightning Labs might be sort of a little more in favor of that idea, I'm curious how you're seeing it. Like, do you think that's a, you know, or I guess to be fair, there's probably also people who maybe, you know, I'm not personally pro-Drive Chain, but there would be people who are pro-Drive Chain as that approach. So, do you see those as kind of the main categories, or do you see any other category? What do you see there?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "10:20", "start": 620.36, "text": "Yeah, I think that's probably a good characterization of all the categories. Like, yeah, like you said, there's like the drive chain, side chain people, which we kind of now can kind of hopefully, like, say we don't need software score because of all the bitVM stuff, they can probably build it with that. And that's similar to like the zk rollup stuff as well. Like, we had, I think it's called like Citria, they like made a PoC or are working on a PoC of a zk rollup using bitVM. So, like, you know Soft forks, and then, you know, if it's like, okay, we created a Tchia bit VM zk rollup, but it's like, it's terribly inefficient, it can't scale, we could like, you know, then find soft forks to make it better, like similar to what we did with Lightning, where, you know, it didn't work perfectly until we had like things like CLTV and stuff, and that made it like a thousand times easier. And then, you know, right now we have the similar thought of like, you know, let's get APO or something to" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "11:20", "start": 679.8, "text": "Ownership, which, you know, it's kind of like, in my opinion, it's like just the most like easiest transition of like, you know, we did all these soft forks that basically enable lightning over the last few years, and then, No, we have Lightning, we've kind of scaled payments, which works really well, you know, you open one channel, you can do a billion payments, close the channel, and, you know, only two on-chain transactions. The problem is, you know, getting every single user a Lightning channel doesn't really work, and these Lightning channels need to be-- it turns out they need to be kind of big, could be because- On-chain fees, you know, break different things in the Lightning security model, so you need to like be able to handle all those different fluctuations. So it kinda just ends up being, just have a big channel and kinda, and then all those problems kinda hide away. So, If we could scale UTXO ownership, then we could have like these channels be, you know, almost shared among users or something, and you can kind of have these different models where you can make Lightning, you know, just basically lower the cost of Lightning, and that's In, in general, good thing. and, yeah, the, the last one is like more the, you know, the fancy things like cat and all that, and it's like, you know, those are just almost like, it's like an undefined space almost. Like, we know some things you can do with cat, but like, you know, you can go on Jeremy Rubin's blog and read like the thousand different things he came up with of how, like, what to do with cat. It's like, those are like almost too scary of like, you know, we enable this Who knows, on, you know, someone's playing, you know, Doom on bi- on Bitcoin or something." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:44", "start": 763.97, "text": "Yeah. one other area that's interesting, I wanna get your view on, there seems to be this, let's say, explosion in the number of L2s, but at the same time, there's been some debate about what counts as an L2, right? Because recently, there's been this kind of explosion of People who are calling themselves a Bitcoin layer two, but then the question is, some of these things kind of have their own token, and then it sort of becomes like, is this more like a side chain and it's not truly an L2 that offers a unilateral exit in the same way that Lightning does, and arguably- Arguably state chains could maybe fit in that category also. So maybe, let's say the people who are more strict about what is an L2 would say maybe, you know, just Lightning, maybe state chains, and then there's a lot of other people who are having a very, let's say, expansive or permissive definition where they're counting You know, all kinds of things. as a, as an L2 for Bitcoin, where do you stand on that kind of, framing?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "13:42", "start": 821.84, "text": "Yeah, there's like, you can take like the most extreme position and be like, Coinbase is an L2 because you deposit, you can make internal transfers, and then withdraw, but like obviously that's completely trusted. So, Yeah, I disagree with that. I think like, I think the unilateral exit is probably the most agreed upon definition, it makes the most sense, you know, if I always have a transaction I could broadcast, get my money back, without any trust assumptions pretty much, like that sounds good to me. So that, yeah, things like state chains and, you know, some like two-way Peck's I chains you can count into that. I think Lightning is kind of like Almost a step better than that, 'cause like, not like, things like, or something like Ark as well, falls into that first category of like, you know, it's a two way peg, or not two way peg, it's a, you know, you have this unilateral exit. But the problem I think with like things like that is like, you have, you kind of need, like in Ark, you need these ASPs in like these side chains, you kind of need like side chain like miners or validators and these like, you know, basically how you go in and out of them. There versus like, if you wanted to start up like something like Ark, you need to like basically find someone that's willing to front the capital to start up like a, an Ark service provider and like take it on as like almost a business venture. It's like really hard to start up as like a, you know, payments network with Needing, requiring like service providers versus just like with Lightning, it's kind of, you can almost just bootstrap yourself with a couple channels, which is like really, really hard to replicate. Like that's why I think like Lightning Is doing so well is because, like, it's kind of like the perfect, idealist L2 of like, there isn't like almost, like, we can improve the trade-offs of like online availability and all that kind of stuff, but like on the actual decentralization of the network, it's like kind of unbeatable in that regard because there isn't no like service providers or anything like that. It's mostly like we use service providers to improve the UX, it's not service providers to like function the network, which is like kind of a really different model than a lot of the other L2s Improve Lightning and make it even better, or, you know, if we're gonna come up with a new scaling solution, L2 kind of thing, I hope it can have the properties of Lightning in that regard, because I think like having these service providers required for us in L2 is like not ideal and it's, you know, it's not the ideal that we could have in the future. And if we're trying to make Bitcoin this decentralized perfect thing, you know, we should strive for that ideal, but, you know, it is a lot harder to do, so we'll" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:09", "start": 968.71, "text": "see Sort of level of gradations, right? So from like Bitcoin, you know, in your multisig, in your cold storage versus maybe Bitcoin single sig, then Lightning, and then maybe you've got like state chains, and maybe some of these other ideas that are, you know, and then maybe you've got liquid somewhere in there, and then you've got just like custodial exchange at the, at the very end, right? You're just fully trusting somebody. Maybe Fedimint is somewhere, somewhere there, but I guess that's sort of the, the spectrum we're dealing with, and Push people towards one side, but you know that at least today, we know that not everybody can go on chain because as you said, we can scale payments with Lightning, but we can't necessarily scale users who can self-custody or unilateral exit, right? so I guess that's, that's where we stand for now, right?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "16:57", "start": 1016.93, "text": "Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, it's basically like figuring out like, do we try to scale ownership with Lightning, which is like what a lot of the different proposals are kind of right now, or it's like, do we just like Lightning is a bridge for these other altitudes we're gonna build. Like, that's kind of like the arc or like Fedimen approach of like, you know, let's build these alternate systems and we just bridge them all together with Lightning. And, you know, maybe we do have these service providers, but it's permissionless, so anyone can be a service provider, so it's not like centralized or anything. And, but it's, you know, it's still not that a perfect ideal. Everyone has their perfect self custody, but, you know, if, if, you know, if That's a pretty good world, it's way better than this world, so, I'd still be happy, but, you know, my ideal is to hopefully get lightning to be able to scale to everyone, but, you know, it's gonna be a lot harder. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:44", "start": 1063.58, "text": "So look, put it this way, let's say of the currently available proposals, if you had a magic wand, Ben Carman's got a magic wand to, pick a soft fork or a pro- or let's say a current proposal today, if you had to pick one, what would you pick? Oh man, I don't want this power." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "18:01", "start": 1081.49, "text": "I don't know, I would probably pick, I, I re- I'm really getting convinced by the LN enhanced proposal. I think it's, really tactical where he's like, basically took all the things of APO and emulated them with CTV, plus some other stuff, and I think that's kind of beautiful. And it's like kind of giving us the best of both worlds, and it looks like we could probably take CTV and like basically upgrade it in the future to something like TX hash, so I think that could be quite beautiful. But yeah, I mean, who knows, maybe tomorrow someone comes out with another governance proposal. So yeah, it's, there's a lot of different things in flux as a problem. Like, you know, a lot of these, there was like basically like a two month period or like maybe like six month period, like a few years ago, where basically like every week we'd get a new governance proposal on the Bitcoin mailing list, and I was like, okay, like I guess there's an infinite way a number of to do these things. So now it's like, it's, there's kind of settled on like five different options. We have like CTV, TX hash, Merkleize all the things, there's, people emulated with OP_CAT, and then there's like APO as well. It's like, so there's, this is like all these different things, all the different trade-offs, and like, you know It's, it's kinda weird like what to pick for the trade-off. Like, we could do CAT and have like basically infinite functionality now, but it's like way less efficient on-chain. But then the argument's like, who cares about the efficiency? Like, people are inscribing JPEGs, like, you know, we don't-- Why do we care? But, you know, obviously wanna reduce the cost and stuff, so- Things get better with like CTV and TX hash, but then enable too much, functionality maybe or like too complex and all that stuff. So I think all in hands kind of picks a perfect middle ground of the current proposals right now. But like, you know, if I had to like wave a magic, if I like, if I was given this power, I don't know I'd actually use it, 'cause it's, that's scary. And like, you know, maybe, maybe, you know, a week from now something else comes up better, but we've already, you know So it is hard, but yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:00", "start": 1200.21, "text": "Yeah, and so I guess out of, let's say those categories that we spoke about before, right, zero knowledge stuff, you know, extension blocks or block size increase, covenants, you, you sort of are veering mostly towards the covenants, you think that's probably the most fruitful pathway to go, is that what your view is?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "20:18", "start": 1218.15, "text": "Yeah, definitely. Like, I think, like, like I said, like, covenants give us the most likely way to have that, like, perfect, like, decentralized unilateral exit, you needed kind of thing. and like block size increase, I think it's like, we, we already beat that horse to death, like that's not gonna happen and, probably not even a good thing. And like the zk rollup stuff, like I don't know, like the shitcoin space like really uses that stuff a bunch, but like if you talk to them, they're like, \"Yeah, it's like basically one validator running the whole thing. It's like not, like, it's basically just like kind of throwing tons of fancy math in front of regulators to be like, \"Oh, it's definitely decentralized when it's actually not.\" So I don't like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:58", "start": 1258.07, "text": "a regulatory arbitrage play." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "21:00", "start": 1260.01, "text": "Exactly, exactly, like, like all the shit coins are. So, I, I don't actually like put too much credence on those. I, I mean, if someone could like pull off a real, like a real decentralized version of one, that'd be great, but, you know, I'll, I'll, you know, I'm waiting to see it, kind of thing. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:15", "start": 1274.75, "text": "Okay, so let's, if we're talking in the realm of covenants, what do you see as the big- You know, what are the big levers here? What's gonna really move the needle? Is it things like non-interactive channels or cold channels, or is it, congestion control, or, you know, or I know there's a covenant impact on DLCs. What, what do you see as the, like, what are we really hoping for with covenants?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "21:36", "start": 1296.3, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I think like the, the dream is like kind of like the payments pool idea where basically like, basically a bunch of people enter into like a pool and now they like all share one DUTXO and they're able to make transactions within each other like seamlessly and then they can, you know, bridge that to Lightning and stuff as well. And, I think that's kind of the dream 'cause like, it gives you like not only like amazing like scalability, but like extremely good privacy properties where like, you know, there's, you basically don't need the coin join Everything is inside of a coin join, it's, well, it's inside a UTXO, not a giant transaction. So it becomes like, you know, basically breaks all the models for like, all the scaling problems and all the privacy problems of Bitcoin. But, you know, it is a dream. It's like there's, there's no real, true proposal of how to do that yet in a easy way without like either like a million soft forks or like super complex state machines and stuff that's gonna be hard to operate and then, you know, different online requirements and all that stuff. So Really hard, but in theory, if we could do it, that'd be the dream. So I think like moving towards that is the best possible. And yeah, I think like step one is kind of like, okay, we have no way to share UTXO with users besides multisig, which requires an always online compliance. So let's just, you know, activate some sort of covenant that gives us, you know, the ability to share UTXOs, trustlessly, and that would like give us a huge upgrade in functionality. And I think, I, I feel like Is having some sort of covenants will not, will like, will enable all these things that we've like, people have been researching for years and have ideas of, but I'm guessing that's gonna expire, you know, new developers to come up with brand new things. Somewhere like, you know, we talked about Taproot for basically like six years or something, the kind of the core ideas, and, you know, two or three years after Taproot's been activated, BitVM came out, an accident, and it's like whole new functionality that no one thought was possible. I think, It does, and turns out it enables, you know, who knows, some crazy thing, and, it's just like a small primitive that gives actually like a ton of like new po-possibilities. Like, I mean, like you brought up the DLCs thing, it's like, like that's like, you know- A super small thing, but reduces the cost of DLCs by like, you know, a million x basically, of just like, you know, you no longer need to store a million signatures and verify all these signatures, you just You know, get, generate the same address and you're done. Like, it's so much easier. So, I do think like things like that could like really elevate what's possible next, and like, I think we activated like something like CTV or the full thing of like L1 hands, like, we'll have like, you know, now like five, ten years of work worth of work to do of like, you know, getting lightning and all these different protocols up to date with like the latest and greatest. And in that meantime, a ton of new research is gonna happen with those new primitives" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "24:25", "start": 1465.39, "text": "And we'll have a new path of like, okay, we did CTV, and now we know that like this is the next move. Like, like, you know, if you think back to in like 2016 or 17, like when SegWit activated We, we knew like, okay, Lightning is starting, it's barely working kind of thing. And there was, I think, I don't know when the L2 paper came out, maybe like 2018, 19. There was like some ideas of like, okay, we can make this better. And now, like, you know, almost 10 years later since Lightning started, we have like all these different ways to improve Lightning that we know, but we just, you know, have to like pick one now. And I think like the same thing's gonna happen where it's like The ideas are just kind of starting to form, and once we actually hit play with them in the wild, like we'll really get all those ideas out and then have a clear path forward. But like if we just sit around picking one thing that's gonna be perfect, it's, we're not gonna actually, like, you know, you have to kind of like get users, get, some like, you know, testing in the real world and be like, okay, this is the real problem, not this, and have a clear path forward. So yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:24", "start": 1524.02, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. The leading Bitcoin and blockchain visualizer is mempool dot space. I go there all the time. 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So for example, you can get the seed plate and punch out your twelve or twenty-four words and keep that in a safe location separate from your main, device location, of course, and that can help Help you back up your private keys. So to get your gear, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera, get your cold card or pre-order your cold card Q over there at coinkite dot com. And now back to the show. Yeah, and you mentioned payment pools as well. I guess probably also interesting to point out here that Ark kind of is a payment pool, right? I mean, there's some elements of payment pool in Ark, but maybe the main downside, as most people see it there, is the very high capital requirement for ASP These, I, I guess that's probably the main downside, would you say, or do you see other downsides there?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "28:00", "start": 1680.21, "text": "Yeah, yeah, ARC is, yeah, ARC is that kind of part of that dream, like it, it is like basically a payment pool, like you put it, you deposit in, and it's like Basically you're just like kind of transacting within the system, unless you, and, and you can do like lightning payments out of it and everything, it kind of gives you that dream. The problem is like, you know, it's, you have these giant ASBs that have to do transactions like every few seconds to like bring down the transaction latency for, for the payments within, and it, like That like really blows the chain, like a ton of on-chain payments, and it has, you know, you, you have these requirements for this giant ASP that, you know, it's not only the capital, but then like, you know, server uptime, all this stuff, and it's like, you know, maybe we could somehow figure out how to federate it and stuff like that, but that's, you know, even more complicated, so Who knows, but yeah, I think ARC would be awesome to have, and like, I think there's a way to do it today, but it's like kind of unusable for like end users because of the online requirements and stuff. But, if we did have like something, I think, I think it needs CTV, and then you can like kind of do like the, the really nice version of ARC. But, yeah, I mean, that, that's another thing, it's like, you know, we can talk about ARC all day, but it's like, unless You know, unless someone like, you know, puts Ark on a mobile app, like we're not really gonna know how well it works until like someone does that, because, you know, just like facing reality is like the best way to figure out if your thing works or not. Like, we can't, we can draw on a whiteboard all day, but who knows if it actually works?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:20", "start": 1760.08, "text": "Yeah, and the other point around simplicity, not the soft fork, to be clear, simplicity in general that we're talking about here is You know, people like you and I and let's say listeners of this podcast will probably be more tech savvy or at least interested, and so we might be interested to talk about some of these ideas. But in practice, what happens on the, you know, rubber meets the road, there needs to be, you know, an app, there needs to be something that people can actually use, right? There needs to be signal so that people can use encrypted chat and not re- expecting everybody to be using PGP and like being a hacker man, right? Obviously, you and I understand that, but then maybe That's something where, you know, it really has to be made productized and simple enough that, you know, everyday user can just use an app. Otherwise, it just becomes like a bunch of nerds all theory crafting about some hypothetical system that isn't actually being used and can't actually be used." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "30:14", "start": 1813.55, "text": "Yeah, I mean, even further, it's like, you know, we could like, like, we've been talking about things like CTV, APO, it's, you know, like, there's a bunch of Bitcoin app devs that have no idea what these mean, or like, you know, they can, they kind of have an idea like, \"Oh, okay, that enables this,\" but like, you know, it's really like, you know, it's almost the, the software devs have to convince like the, then like the Lightning protocol devs who have to convince then" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "30:43", "start": 1843.23, "text": "Yeah, so like, I don't really want CTV, like, I think Matt Carman's been a lot of, talking against it. He's like, \"I wanna get rid of like these properties of lightning, not those properties of lightning, and stuff like that.\" So there's, you know, there's lots of different trade-offs everyone wants to make, and, it's, it's hard. So yeah, there's all these steps of like, the app devs just like, \"Users complain about this, I wanna get rid of this,\" and there's the protocol devs" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:13", "start": 1873.33, "text": "Mutiny. I've, had a quick go at it myself. I've, you know, just had a quick play around. But basically, it's a browser-based wallet, and you can install it as like a, like a, like an app on your phone or what's the word, PWA, Progressive Web App. do you wanna just talk a little bit? You know, just give us a high-level overview what is Mutiny Wallet?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "31:35", "start": 1895.28, "text": "Yeah, I mean, Mutiny is the kind of the goal is try to make the best self-custodial Lightning wallet, and, in doing that, we kind of learned self-custodial is really hard for a lot of users, so, now it's coming kind of like a hybrid wallet where, like right now, like basically for most users, it's self-custodial Lightning, it's running LDK and BDK in your web browser, and, Well, it's like trying to make the best Lightning app w-with that. So, it's been pretty good so far. We have like a lot of, a lot of different users now, you know, we-- There are times we got lots of forced closures, we fixed like most of those now, just like hardening the app and everything like that. And now basically our biggest complaint is things like, \"Oh, I can't receive offline,\" \"Oh, I don't have a Lightning address,\" and all that stuff. So, now we're kind of going down this path of" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "32:23", "start": 1942.66, "text": "Fedim Where, you know, you can't receive offline, okay, well, if you're offline, it goes into a fediment and then you can sleep it to your lightning channel once you're online. Or same with the lightning address, you know, you can't, you can't run an HTTP server on your phone, okay, the fediment will, and then you'll, you'll sleep it to your balance, when you come online and stuff like that. So basically, you know, we're trying to like make this best lightning experience and, and, With that, we're, you know, combining things like Fedim to try to make it better. And, yeah, something we're also working on is like a lot of different social features, like right now we have like, synced noster contacts and stuff like that. We have an update coming out soon that's gonna like, kind of like, make that like first-class citizen in the app, so like, it's gonna be faces everywhere, you can really, like, really make it really easy to, to pay friends and stuff. Like, I'm here in Madeira right now" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "33:18", "start": 1998.37, "text": "Someone pays for, for lunch, and then you have to, like, you wanna pay them back. They'd like generate an invoice, you have to scan it, and do that for every single person at lunch, it takes forever. It's nice now, everyone just like, okay, oh, Paul paid, everyone searches Paul, you hit send, and it's done. You don't need to like do that invoice dance. It really makes the, the experience like a lot better, so we're having a lot of fun" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:38", "start": 2017.68, "text": "with that. One quick question just on that, I mean, what about in the" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "33:47", "start": 2027.44, "text": "Yeah, I mean, that's, that's the eternal question. So basically, I mean, right now we just, we're trusting your contact list to the people you follow on Noster. So if you follow a fake Paul, like, you're fucking up, I guess. but yeah, I mean, Noster has ways to fix this. Like, we display like the Lightning address, you can make sure, okay, like, you are future Paul, at alby dot com or whatever, and you're like, okay, that's the one I'll send to. And then The bootstrapping of Noster is hard, of like verifying who you're actually, becoming friends with or following and stuff. So, yeah, we, we have different ideas around that. Like, we wanna add like onboarding inside of Mutiny onto Noster. We wanna be able to like invite friends into Noster, and then like when you invite them, they like auto-follow you and stuff like that. So, different things like that that try to, like, you know, make that harder to happen." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:35", "start": 2075.23, "text": "Cool, cool. And so, I guess the other big criticism, and I'm" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:43", "start": 2083.15, "text": "Security being difficult, people being, maybe less able to verify what's going on with an update of the app, right? Could it be a malicious update? Could you just explain a little bit of your thoughts around browser level security for this obviously monetary app?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "34:57", "start": 2097.02, "text": "Yeah, I mean, like all those critics are not wrong. Like, the browser is a scary place and, basically like, you know, we do have native apps that you can, I mean, just they're, they're in beta right now, like you can download the APK and we have an, an iOS test flight" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "35:13", "start": 2113.21, "text": "The browser stuff, like, you probably should use the app, like most users should be using the app. The reason we did the browser stuff is because of, basically like, you know, these app stores can just box everyone out and like, I think it was in like twenty thirteen or fourteen, like Apple banned all Bitcoin wallets, like that could very well happen again and then, everyone is screwed. So Kind of the thing is just like we always want that fallback of like, you know, we aren't gonna be stopped by these app stores even if they want to, because we have this web fallback. Even if like the web is like point one percent of your user base, that's fine. It's just basically just having that safety net of being able to come back, and, you know, not be stopped. 'Cause a lot of things, like, you know, if you're using, something like maybe like Phoenix where it's only in the app store, like if you You have to like go find another closing, yeah, using Electrum and recovering that way, right? Yeah, ex- exactly, which is like, you know, ninety-nine percent of the users won't be able to figure that out. At least, you know, the target audience we're going for, trying to get like everyone on Lightning, so that's gonna be really hard. So basically, having that web fallback makes it really easy, to like safeguard against. And as well, it kind of lets us, you know, give this like super easy onboarding where like a lot of times, you know, okay, like you're trying to onboard your waitress or something, and it's like, okay, download this app, you gotta search in the app store, and it's fifty megabyte file, it takes forever to download on the shady WiFi, and then, you know, you have to set up the wallet, backup your seed, all this stuff, like it's a long process versus like basically now we, you know, you send someone the link, And it's like, they just like go to the link, they're like, \"Wait, that was it? I thought I had to like sign up, like, no, you're, you have a wallet now. It's like, you know, kind of fun to like, just like put it like into people's hands and, you know, they're kind of like almost like, don't even consent, they just have lightning without even trying to, which is, which is fun." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:06", "start": 2225.51, "text": "Yeah. Now walk us through, some of the initial setup there because I, I had to play around" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:20", "start": 2239.88, "text": "Using Lightning to receive from another Lightning, you know, node that I have and sent into that, and it then auto-created the channel, and I interestingly, I noted that it actually had some capacity on both sides. So could you just tell us a little bit about, you know, what you're doing there, how the setup works?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "37:35", "start": 2254.65, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So we're working with Voltage as our LSP. They have a product called, Flow 2.0. So yeah, basically like, if you don't have any channels yet, it's fresh new wallet, and you hit receive, you can still receive on Lightning. And basically, the payment will hit Voltages' LSP node, and then- Like basically for you, you still need to channel to receive it to your end, so Volters will open a channel to you for that payment, plus a little bit extra, and forward the payment to you, so you can get the, the final channel and the payment. And, yeah, so right now what it does is adds on an extra hundred k Sats for that, so you get some inbound. So your next receive doesn't won't have to have a charge as well, as long as it's under that hundred k limit. So yeah, that's kind of the goal, I've been doing Node for like five years, and I, I refuse to manage channels. I'm just like, \"I'm not touching it. I opened these channels forever ago, and they're just gonna work. \" And it mostly works, but like for, like, you know, I, there's a, that thing's been running forever, and like, that's different for mobile wallets where you can't really do that. So, The LSP kind of gates all that stuff for us, and something we've been exploring a lot is like, you know, most wallets, like something like Phoenix or Zeus, like they all have like their own LSP, same with Breeze, like it's like the wallet and the LSP are like a, you know, tied entity, but we're kind of taking a different approach of like, we're just trying to make like we're just trying to make the wallet and let the LSPs like be run by, you know, those professionals. Like, we're a bunch of devs, we, we don't know, like, you know, like I said, I don't run my, I don't manage my channels, I don't wanna have to do that for, you know, a million users on our, on our LSP. So we let Voltage do that. We're also like in talks with other people to like, add other LSP options. So trying to make like, you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "39:24", "start": 2363.84, "text": "Best app in class, and then let the LSPs compete instead of like having the apps compete, kind of thing. So, you know, we're working, you know, in progress there. We're still, right now Volters is the only option, but we should have more options coming soon. Great. So, I mean, I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:37", "start": 2376.97, "text": "guess s-some of that, I presume, is based on the LSP spec. So listeners, check out my earlier episode with Severin, Alex, Biola, where we kind of went in detail about the LSP spec." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:49", "start": 2389.02, "text": "but yeah" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:54", "start": 2394.12, "text": "There'll be, you know, more challenges coming and maybe certain, even at a jurisdictional level, right? As, as you know, as listeners probably know, Wallet Satoshi left the US market because presumably they didn't wanna serve US customers, probably because of AML concerns, is my guess, and so we may start to see that in other countries as well. We'll see. Maybe it's just a US thing, we don't know. but, you know, maybe that allows people to sort of use a wallet from one jurisdiction but an LS- from another, and then that can sort of help sort of decentralize things a little bit further that way also. I'm curious if you see, you know, further coming down the line there, like it seems like the US government is sort of now, currently, there's been a recent, bit of an attack against the miners. Do you see more coming at a lightning level?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "40:47", "start": 2446.57, "text": "at a lightning level, maybe. I think, honestly, my biggest fear is all the taproot asset stuff. Like, once we start having lightning nodes being like almost mini-exchanges, like swapping tether for lightning, like, you could probably make a better argument that they're, like money service businesses. So I think that could really heat it up once, lightning labs, get all, get all that stuff out going. But I think at the moment, there's not too much pressure. Luckily, lightning's still pretty small, so people haven't really, like Fight them, fight them yet. Like, the, the thing is, like, you know, most users today are custodial Lightning users, so it's so much easier to just be like, let's just go after Wallet Satoshi or something and try to, you know, pressure them versus like attacking individual node operators just because, like You're getting like, you know, way more users. Then the easier choke" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:32", "start": 2491.56, "text": "points to go after, right? Yeah, easier choke" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "41:33", "start": 2493.19, "text": "point and like more effective, you're attacking more like individuals that way. So that's what they've been doing. I think, you know, maybe, maybe if we succeed in our goal of trying to get everyone on self-custody of lightning, maybe it's a good thing then they'll come after us, but, not yet so far. But yeah, we'll see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:47", "start": 2507.25, "text": "I think the other criticism people would have, and I mean, we kind of spoke" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:55", "start": 2514.85, "text": "Bitcoin today can't support that many users. Will people get priced out of this, right? And it's kind of like, well, what, what are you building here if only, you know, as, you know, Brandon said on that episode, and you probably agree, we're probably talking somewhere between ten to one hundred million users who can non-custodially use Bitcoin anyway in a world with eight billion people and probably three hundred million entities? You know, over eight billion entities, it's, we're not, we're just not gonna get that many people using the thing. And so I guess the challenge would be, will people get priced out of using this?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "42:25", "start": 2545.3, "text": "Yeah, I mean, we directly experienced that during the huge fee spikes like of last year, like fees were like five hundred sat per vbyte, and like even if you have your channel open, it still affects you because when you make a spend on Lightning, you have to be able to afford if that channel closes while you're spending it, so you have to be able to afford the At those high fee rates, it was like, even if you have like, people would have like, you know, two hundred k sat on Lightning, but it's all effectively, useless to them because the channel fees just to be able to spend that was too expensive. So, yeah, we do like experience that already of like, you know, having these, you know, in the future, this is gonna be the barrier to entry is gonna be higher and higher. So this is why we're kind of going down the fedimint path of like, okay, you can start" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "43:14", "start": 2593.85, "text": "Often worry about chain fees. And then, you know, once, say, you get enough money in the app where you can now justify having your own channel, then you can go and do that. And, so that's kind of the goal there, is kind of making this hybrid wallet where, you know, you can elevate yourself without having to like change wallets and change every, your whole, trust model and stuff, you know? You just like, you can start in Fedi Mint and then move to Lightning when you're ready, when it makes sense to, instead of just like forcing" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "43:44", "start": 2623.87, "text": "was in this app to use it, like we don't want that. So Fedimint has kind of that nice bridge for us to get there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:49", "start": 2629.46, "text": "I see. So that's the-- and that's why you, you mentioned the hybrid aspect. So can you just talk a little bit about how exactly you plan to build in like Fedimint support or, you know, Fedim-- is it Fedimint support in the Mutiny app or how, how's that gonna work?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "44:03", "start": 2642.86, "text": "Yeah, it's actually already in there, it's just, a little bit hidden. But if you go" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:11", "start": 2650.57, "text": "to" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "44:14", "start": 2653.79, "text": "Invite code, and then once you have that, you're a part of it, and you can start transacting. So right now the way it works is like if you have a federation, then all your, sends will go in there if it's under like two hundred k satz, I think. And then, then we have the, like, once you have a balance in there, there'll, a swap button will come up, and you can click that if you wanna swap it into self-custodial. So basically, we're trying to like, you know, have that iterative" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "44:44", "start": 2683.81, "text": "And you can like receive like, you know, one sat and it'd still work. And then, you know, as you accumulate that balance, then you'd swap into self-custodial lightning when you're ready. And, you know, we'll probably have like different like modes of like, you know, fed mint only, lightning only, you can have like, you know- receive on FEDIMIN, but swap and then always, withdraw it straight to self-so Lightning when you're online, like stuff like that. So, you know, we're still like, kind of valuing that, like, you know, the FEDIMIN stuff is really, really new. It's, you know, like the FEDIMIN team just released like the zero dot two of the FEDIMIN software, which is like kind of their, we're trying to, maintain backwards compatibility for now on, so like, trying to make less breaking changes" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "45:29", "start": 2729.12, "text": "There's like barely any mainnet federations, if any, it's mostly like hobby, kind of federations, not like the liquid federation kind of thing that's, that's gonna run for like six years. So we're still like kind of getting, you know, our feet wet, but, the end goal is to kind of get there where everyone is using this stuff, for their, you know, small value payments, and any large stuff goes into self-custodial." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:51", "start": 2750.68, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. Nomadcapitalist dot com can help you with offshore tax planning, plan B residence and citizenship, and so much more. 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So would that concept exist in a Mutiny wallet context or it's more like," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "49:38", "start": 2978.06, "text": "We're, we're not gonna like run the Guardian or anything in a web browser, that's a bit too much, but, yeah, we wanna have like basically like, we wanna eventually have defaults, that just make it easier so you don't have to think about that. But as part of that, like, you know, somewhere to the LSP thing we're talking about, like, we want it to be like, you don't just have to use ours or the one we recommend, we want like a free market. So something that I have to work on this week actually" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "50:02", "start": 3002.42, "text": "is" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "50:08", "start": 3007.6, "text": "properties, it's a, you know, this one's a one of one or this one's a five of seven, so you can evaluate the different trust models and maybe even assign like, okay, this is a five of seven, this is, you know, seven anons or this is a five of seven, but it's, you know, Matt, Marty, Stefan, yeah, you know, people you trust kind of thing. So, you know It's, it's all work in progress, but yeah, I think we wanna have like kind of a discoverability area in the app, so it's like, I don't wanna trust this one, but I know this one I trust, or this one, they can find one that they can trust and move to that. So that's kind of the goal. We're also like working on, we, we have like mailable cashew support we're working on as well for like sweeping cashew tokens, just kind of like, just kind of like let all the different models work" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:48", "start": 3047.85, "text": "and" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:54", "start": 3054.37, "text": "Proponents also is this idea that you might have one app with connections to multiple. So, and I, and I believe, someone correct me if you correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand the Fedi app also allows you to have multiple Fedi mints that you are sort of connected with, and you might have, you know, ten thousand sat on one Fedi mint and another twenty thousand sat on another and so on. So would you build a similar functionality in Mutiny? Like you would have Mutiny and you might have like a balance with, you know, anon federation and another one with thing and then another balance that's self-custodial, you would have like multiple balances?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "51:29", "start": 3088.73, "text": "Yeah, yeah, we actually do have multiple federation support in the app. It's, we haven't tested it too well 'cause there's not enough federations really to like battle-harden it yet, but, there's like support there and like in theory, you can do things where it's like, say you have like ten k Sats in one federation and ten k Sats in another, if you get an invoice for fifteen k Sats, in theory, you could pay it where it" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "51:54", "start": 3114.27, "text": "Exactly, exactly. So, you know, we haven't implemented any of that stuff yet, but in theory, it's possible. So we kind of wanna have, like, you know, it would be cool, like, maybe there isn't a default federation, it's default federations, and you like, you, you, by default, you know, it gets split among like three federations. So if one rug pulls, it's not just all of our users, all their money's gone. You know, it's like, okay, everyone got a" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:17", "start": 3137.23, "text": "haircut, sucks, but it's What's my Lightning, what's my this, what's my that. interesting. Okay. also, I know, obviously, you were working at Shortbit, you know, in a, in a past, Bitcoin life, let's say, and you were kind of interested in the DLC and, I know, a concept there was this idea of stable channels and synthetic USD for some users. I know this is an area you're considering for Mutiny Wallet also. So can you just elaborate a bit there, what are you looking to build there?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "52:51", "start": 3170.9, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting. If you talk to like people, like honestly, like one of the biggest like crypto users in the world are like, they don't actually, they're using like USDC and USDT kind of things. Or they're just like, you know, they don't have access to banking, but Tether is like the best thing that they could ever have 'cause it's dollars and it's like, you know, they can kind of custody their money versus like, you know, we're all like here, just like, we have modern banking kind of things, but we just don" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "53:20", "start": 3200.4, "text": "This to dollars and, you know, we don't, you know, Mutiny is using self-custodial Lightning, there's no, the dollars on Lightning yet, kind of thing. So, there's kind of like two ways we can do it. Like Fetty Mint has this, a concept called, stability pools, which is like similar to like kind of DLT model where you have, basically like, people like taking different, bets on the Bitcoin price, and you can take, basically, just take a bet saying, \"I'm going short Bitcoin I feel like really powerful because basically we can have like a Bitcoin wallet that, you know, even if you don't wanna use Bitcoin, you can start out just using it as a dollars wallet, and then once you like see, like, \"Hey, these invoices, the, the amounts keep getting lower, but it's the same dollars,\" and it's like, \"Yeah, Bitcoin price is going up,\" and it kind of becomes like an orange peeling method. So yeah, I think like, you know, just basically trying to make it like feature complete with every single kind of use case that users would They just want it to be like a money app, not a Bitcoin app, and then, you know, we can kind of get the most of the amount of users onboarded onto Bitcoin if we're just, you know, basically just throwing Bitcoin in their face at every chance while they're using their normal stuff. but yeah, that's kind of our goal. We, we even talked about like, what if we added like, you know, Tron support, of like, you know, if a Tron invoice comes up, we can, we can, do like a, a swap of like, you know, yeah," }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "54:58", "start": 3297.63, "text": "Bitcoin wallet could pay any shitcoiner in the world, and any shitcoiner could pay you, but you'll receive Bitcoin. Like, that's kind of great and, and you know, it's an interesting concept, you know, building it's another thing of like building out all those services and stuff, but, I do kind of think it's an interesting thought experiment of like, you know If we go, if you say, \"Okay, we're allowing dollars into this app,\" it's like, \"Well, why not allow other shit coins?\" And, you know, yeah, interesting. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:24", "start": 3323.96, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And I guess for some users, it's kind of like you're, you're trying to give them a baby step way in, so I can understand that. And I, and I st-- and I understand even with the Aqua guys, they're kind of doing it, but it's like a, it's like a liquid-based sort of wallet, like Other aspects of it are kind of like an LBTC base, but you can kind of pay out over Lightning or receive in using Tether, not just Liquid Tether, but Ethereum Tether and Tron Tether, because it's using like swap providers in the background. So I guess in a similar way, Mutiny could build a similar kind of, hey, swap in, swap out, whatever you want, but like your balance held with us is a Bitcoin and Lightning balance. That, that would be the idea, right?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "56:06", "start": 3365.87, "text": "Yeah, exactly. Of like, you know, if you wanna interact with" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "56:11", "start": 3370.63, "text": "the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:14", "start": 3374.07, "text": "But then I guess the only other aspect, when it comes to synthetic USD, as we kind of spoke about earlier, people getting priced out of things, the stable channel concept, and, you know, you'll understand this better than me, so you correct me here, but my understanding is that does require a bit more on-chain interaction to, or at least the possibility of more on-chain interaction, poten-- if there, especially if there's violent moves in the price, which might be hard from a user experience perspective, right, compared to if I'm thinking of, let's say, people using, let I think as an another example where it's kind of like a, it's a custodial Bitcoin and a Lightning app, but they've got stable sats in there, and that's kind of their way of giving the users a, a quote-unquote USD balance. How would, how would the Mutiny style synthetic USD or kind of stable channel DLC style work." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "57:02", "start": 3421.95, "text": "Yeah, I mean, we've talked about this a lot internally of like, you know, maybe it doesn't even make sense to kind of build that because like, we could just do it inside the Fed Mint. It's so much easier and like- All right. So kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:13", "start": 3432.64, "text": "like offload it to them and let them kind of handle that." }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "57:15", "start": 3435.1, "text": "Yeah, and it's just like, because like at the end of the day, like if you're using Tether, you already have a trust model, so it's like taking self-custodial of your Tether, Tether is like, it's still not self-custodial, so it's like, why are we going through this headache of like ten-axing the complexity, re- implementing everything? We still have a trust model at the end of the day. So maybe just like throw it A single channel, it's like, okay, this channel is fixed in size and making payments is like this whole complex thing, and like, you know, if I wanna like sell some to like back to Bitcoin, it's like this whole other thing, it's like, you know, complicates like everything versus like, the FedMe can kinda just handle all that for us, and then, you know, we still get the experience, same experience, and it's like, the trust model isn't that much different where it's like kinda worth all that effort. You know, maybe you wanna hold like a Browser app, like, you know, that's, that's not the use case for Mutiny, so, you know, it kinda gets into those different, trade-offs there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:19", "start": 3498.84, "text": "Yeah, gotcha. So in your mind, who's the target audience for Mutiny?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "58:25", "start": 3505.31, "text": "our hope is like, our goal is like, you know, the, like the, the Bitcoiners like us who like, you know, I want to recommend the best Lightning wallet to, for that's, that's on your phone. So like, kind of like, you know, hopefully every Bitcoiner's using it, and then when you go to onboard your friend or your waiter or, you know, whoever guy in the street You also recommend Mutiny, 'cause not only is it good for like the hardcore Bitcoiners, but it's good for the, the first time Bitcoiners, and that, that's kind of why we're doing this hybrid approach of like, you can start out in this, easy, fedimen world where all you have to do is, you know, you don't worry about channels or fees or really anything like that, you just hit send and receive and it happens. And then, you know, as you understand more and more along your Bitcoin journey, we have different ways to" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "59:12", "start": 3552.4, "text": "A few years later, you have to like call them up and be like, \"Oh, by the way, it's getting removed from America. \" You have to like go to Mutiny now or go to Phoenix or go to this, and it's like, you're kind of like, you recommend a wallet, but like in the back of your head, you're always like, \"This is the wrong move, they're gonna eventually have to get off of this, \" and it's, it's never a good experience. So we kind of wanna, wanna have that experience in Mutiny where you can But, you know, a lot of things to build there, but, work in progress." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:47", "start": 3586.85, "text": "Yeah. Look, it sounds like a, it's an ambitious vision, but at the same time, I like that we-- that you guys are trying this. You know, there's lots of different approaches out there, right? There are some people who are-- and, you know, and to be fair, there'll be some users who are critical because they don't want any, you know, non-- in any, they don't want any custodial stuff whatsoever. They just want only self" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:13", "start": 3613.17, "text": "so I guess closing up here, any, I guess any final thoughts for people on, you know, where Bitcoin is going? actually, one o-one other area I wanna-- I did wanna ask you about this. So there's been this kind of criticism of, let's say, you know, number go up, right? At the same time, you know, ETF, you know, et cetera. And there's lots of criticisms of that, but at the same time, the-- I, I guess the way I'm seeing it is it's kind of Of course, we wanna sort of get them down the funnel to, you know, I see it as like, you know, whether we like it or not, no matter how many podcasts we do or articles we write or whatever, the price is what pulls a lot of these people in. So I'm curious your view, are you seeing it in a similar way or do you see it as like you know, too many people onboarding into an, on, quote unquote, onboarding into an ETF is a bad thing because they're kind of, they are-- Put it this way, they just want the number go up, they're-- and they're sort of, there's like a tragedy of the commons here, like they just want the number go up, but they're not willing to sort of do anything to help decentralize Bitcoin or keep it decentralized. What do you think about that?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:01:18", "start": 3678.89, "text": "Yeah, I think, it's like basically like, I think it's only I'm, I'm all in on Bitcoin like you guys, and then they're just holding the ETF, and then like, you know, they never actually try to like do anything with it, you know? They never learn what like a block hash or anything is. They're just like, \"Oh, yeah, number go up, I'm with you guys.\" Like, that would be bad, but I think like- You know, the fiat system is like so screwed that it's gonna be okay, like, you know, what's really gonna drive Bitcoin adoption, like, initially right now, is this number go up, but I think the end game isn't number go up, it's, you know, number go down for the dollars and as well as like different, you know, when you wanna go buy McDonald's, they're just gonna stop accepting dollars and be like, \"We're taking Bitcoin only.\" Like, that's when the true adoption happens, when, like, you're kind of like, these merchants you" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:02:10", "start": 3730.75, "text": "We're a long way to get there, but I think like that's gonna be the end game if this is gonna work, because, you know, the smart money in the room and smart people in the room are gonna be like, \"Yeah, we only take Bitcoin now.\" Like, well, a lot, you know, a lot of Bitcoiners are on this path now of like, \"I just live their life in Bitcoin, they don't use dollars anymore.\" And I think the rest of the world will eventually catch on and do the same. It's just like getting to that is gonna be a hard And you know, Neptes two is like, you know, they take self-cust, self-custody of it. You know, Sep three is like, you know, we're selling all of our real estate and we're only holding Bitcoin. But, you know, that's a whiles away probably, but, You know, one day I think is like kind of the end game there. So I think, I'm not too worried about like, you know, everything going into ETFs, like, you know, for one, you know, it's a proof of work system, not a proof of stake system, so even if they have all the Bitcoin, they still have no control over us, so fuck 'em. And then as well, it's like, you know, like you said, the number going up is gonna just draw more and more, eyes and attention to Bitcoin, and in the end The best market you can, you can ever have. So I'm happy about that. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:03:24", "start": 3804.79, "text": "I think, and yeah, and I think, I think that's a fair way to think of it. I think our job, if you will, is to sort of take those ETF Bitcoiners and sort of convert them, let's say, into people who care about liberty and sovereignty and all these aspects, but it's, I think it's folly to just think we can, you know, just, Hector at people to, a-adopt the thing when They are maybe not listening to us or they're not even paying attention to us at all because, you know, we're not important to them at this point, right? maybe later they, you know, they sort of start listening to podcasts, reading books, and using apps like Mutiny and things like this, and at least come down the pathway. any other thoughts you wanna close out on?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:04:07", "start": 3847.06, "text": "no, I mean, outlook is, outlook is good, I think, for Bitcoin, like, you know, number's been going up a lot, so that's been fun. But, you know, it's tech-wise as well, like, you know, we've been talking about the beginning of this pod, like, lots of different things are happening in the space, and it's really exciting to see, like, a lot of these dreams we've had a few years ago are kind of like coming to fruition and things are actually happening. So I've been" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:04:30", "start": 3870.98, "text": "really, it's been And, I look as good." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:04:38", "start": 3878.25, "text": "Yeah, great. Actually, I'm curious, one other thing, you mentioned around the inscriptions, I know, there's been a kind of a lot of debate about the spam, inscriptions, BLC twenty and stamps, if people wanna be more specific about the more kind of pollutive elements of this. in your view, why are they bad?" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:04:53", "start": 3893.99, "text": "that's a good question. So like, this is-- it gets really into like the weeds, 'cause it's like, okay, so like, why are they bad? I mean, they're quote-unquote like polluting the chain, but like, in theory, that's just an incentives problem. Like, we have a block size and everything that's supposed to prevent that. So if the block size isn't solving that, then- Then what is the block size for? So it's either like an admission that the block size is either too big or there's something else that's wrong with the incentive system. I think Stamps kind of highlight that really well where it's just a bunch of outputs and the problem is those outputs can't be pruned from the UTXO set. So, that, you know, that's like kind of like forever growth. That's not just like verify once, but you verify it, now it's stuck in your UTXO set forever. So, yeah, I think like maybe there's an incentive problem there of like outputs are too cheap, and like SegWit tried to fix that, that's kind of why we did the SegWit discount, was it made it cheaper to spend, to, like, to destroy outputs and then to create new outputs. So that was like one of the main things, you know, maybe we should have gone further and like, the thing is we get into this like kind of like- Circular logic where it's like, okay, maybe we should make the witness discount even, bigger, like make it 8x instead of 4x to like disincentivize, all these outputs. But now that's, if we increase the segwit discount, now all these, inscriptions are cheaper and stuff, so now people can put JPEGs in cheaper. So we kinda, you know, it's, we're just like picking, different trade-offs here. So I think like the current set is fine, in my opinion, like Yeah, then at the end of the day, it's like, if this, if Bitcoin's gonna work, these NFTs aren't gonna be valuable in the future most likely, so it's like just let them run out of money, let the, you know, there's always gonna be these, you know, there's a greater, or there's a fool born everyday kind of thing, so like just let it run its course and it'll be fine, like this has happened before, this is gonna happen again, like I'm not too worried about it, but yeah, it's like You know, it, it has highlighted a lot of the Bitcoin space, of like, I think like when I got into Bitcoin in like 2017, the kind of the, the narrative was like, \"Shitcoins are bad, 'cause you can do it all on Bitcoin. Like, you don't need to do, you know, like, these are obviously scams, like, you know, don't buy ICOs and NFTs, but they're also scams 'cause they're telling you you can't do this on Bitcoin. And now like, people are doing" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:07:13", "start": 4033.31, "text": "Like I met someone here in, Madeira at this thing where he was an Ethereum guy and he came to Bitcoin because of, Ordinals and now he's like a Noster dev doing like really cool Bitcoin things as well, and it's like That's gonna happen if we allow these, you know, these shitcoin devs to come. Like, you know, a lot of us, you know, I got into Bitcoin and then shitcoins and then found the light. But a lot of times now, nowadays, people aren't even-- or even before this and Ordinals stuff, people are really just never touching Bitcoin. It's like only, like, they'd be like, \"Oh, it's, it's Ethereum or Solana or Tron,\" they never even thought about Bitcoin as an option. And Ordinals is kind of" }, { "speaker": "ben_carman", "time": "01:07:50", "start": 4070.29, "text": "Whatever percentage of that it is, they're gonna come to see the light of like real Bitcoin stuff, and I think that's gonna be-- We kinda need that 'cause, you know, the more and more developers, more things happening in Bitcoin is always better." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:00", "start": 4080.11, "text": "Yeah, and I think to, I guess to round it off, as, as we've been talking about a lot of different aspects of this episode, you know, biggest challenges, opportunities, soft forks, covenants, you know, what are we doing about trying to onboard people? Ultimately, we want more people" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:17", "start": 4097.25, "text": "to use Bitcoin. If we Ideally, denominating in Bitcoin, right? The more people we can get to sort of mentally do that, we're winning, right? Like we are winning, it's just that, yeah, there's some of these scam, spam things that I would rather not have, but I also recognize I can't stop them, I can't filter them. and so that's kind of, that's how I'm seeing it, but, yeah, thanks for joining me, and I'll put all the links in the show notes. It's, mutinywallet dot com" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:08:49", "start": 4129.97, "text": "Thanks for joining me today. Thank you, Stefan. I hope you enjoyed the show. Get the show notes at stefanlivera dot com slash five five one and don't forget to give the show a like and subscribe if you enjoyed it. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels." } ] }