{ "episodeId": "SLP60", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "askuwheteau_ketominer": { "name": "Askuwheteau & Ketominer", "role": "guest", "tag": "ASKUWHETEAU" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:08", "start": 8.45, "text": "Welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast focused on Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Learn the technology and economics of Bitcoin by listening to interviews with Bitcoin's best and brightest. Today, for episode sixty, we have the Nodle team. They're a great young Bitcoin hardware startup offering a full node product which I bought recently, and I've had a great experience using it. So the Nodle team are Askuwheteau and Ketominer, aka Michael. Here's the interview. Welcome to the show, Askuwheteau and Ketominer or Michael. Hi." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "00:45", "start": 45.13, "text": "Hi, it's fine." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:46", "start": 46.49, "text": "Yeah, it's great to have you guys on the show. I had the opportunity to try out the nodle myself, and I just thought it would be good to get you guys on. I like what you guys are doing. But before we get started, let's just have a bit of an intro from each of you. So, Askuwheteau, maybe you just start." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "01:02", "start": 62.1, "text": "Yeah, hi. Well, we're really excited to be here. we're regular listeners of the show and, and we feel like you have a great lineup, so hopefully- The, the same holds true afterwards. so Ketominer and, and myself, are, have been running the node activity for a couple months now, I'd say roughly six months. And, we come from very different backgrounds. I myself am trying to ex-exam the, the whole banking industry 'cause I'm a banker, and hopefully not for long, But that's, that's where my, I don't know, like fifteen years experience comes from, mainly custody, foreign exchange, and all risk and compliance related type of jobs." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:51", "start": 110.78, "text": "Nice, nice. Yeah, I mean, I personally, in my day job, I actually work in sort of more like risk sort of work. How about you, keto miner?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "01:58", "start": 117.93, "text": "I'm-- I come from an electronics and, IT background, and, I'm like on and off in Bitcoin since 2014, trying to do some cool hardware around it. First started working on a hardware wallet actually in, in 2014, and, it was kind of too early and the- And the tech wasn't, not really ready. and I really came back two years ago with a first prototype of a hardware full node, and that's how it started." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:28", "start": 147.63, "text": "Excellent. So look, let's, I think we should start with the why. So Askuwheteau, I know you've written, a piece here called \"Rise of the Nodes.\" I think that would be a great jumping-off point to start our discussion today. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the problem? What is it that, you know? Where we're facing in terms of, you know, financial surveillance and so on." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "02:50", "start": 170.47, "text": "Well, I, I guess before the surveillance, because maybe that-- we, we talk about that a little more often, I think just the, the inability sometimes to easily conduct business, cross borders with just anyone you want without anyone else meddling in is, is even worse. obviously there's the surveillance, but I think it's kind of cool with Bitcoin how easy it is to just do business, and I think we're lacking infrastructure, and so basically You wanna do business one to one, you have to set that up in a fairly complicated way, 'cause you can't really send invoices and I think running your own node now with the BTC pay servers, et cetera, makes it just easy to set up a business in an hour and run it online. Now the second thing is having a node in your shop also makes it easy to run like physical stores on the Bitcoin network. In about no time." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "04:04", "start": 243.65, "text": "So I think it's really about doing business now, and it's the, the next level in, You know, what we're trying to do is powering businesses." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:15", "start": 254.96, "text": "Fantastic. Alright. And I think part of that is it's just been difficult for people to really participate fully in the whole Bitcoin economy just because of various technical difficulties, and I think that's, to some extent, that's what you guys are trying to solve with your company. So tell us a little bit of the background of how you guys got started." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "04:38", "start": 278.36, "text": "Well, sometimes when, when we look back, I mean, I remember that one night we, we actually met, At the local, like, Paris Bitcoin meetup where, where we go very often, and I remember one night I was walking down the bar, it's a very dark place. And, I passed the table where he was sitting, and, there were lights everywhere on the table, and I just stopped 'cause I looked at it. It was the only thing that was bright in the bar. And he had that pile of devices sitting on the table, and, I asked him what it was, and he was just trying to build all those, those things, you know, you'll always see him with gear. And, he stopped, he said, \"Okay, that's my node, I'm trying to sync it. So you got the battery, you've got the-- I think it was, a Raspberry at the time. He has all those components lying around, and he's just trying to figure it out.\" And month after month, you know, he does the same thing, but, it wasn't very satisfactory, and we never talked about it again. And, just a few months ago You know, the, the components get better, the tests get better, and we figure out that there's nothing like that really outside. And the idea came along like slowly, but, it wasn't, wasn't like we knew at first. It came after a while, so I think that's kind of funny, 'cause it was there the whole time." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "06:09", "start": 369.13, "text": "Yeah, and I, and I would add that this node project would probably never see the, never happen if, that old device that I had two years ago didn't die. Actually, the, the Raspberry Pi and the SSD I used, died after about one year, and, I tried to revive it by any means, like replacing all the parts, and I figure out that it will just not sink in a reasonable time anymore. So I, I started, iterating on different hardware and since I have like twenty different combinations of, mainboards and storages, that I tried before finding the one which gave me a reasonable sync time and, and satisfactory user experience." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:59", "start": 418.97, "text": "I love it that you've really come to this from a point of view of tinkering, and you have been doing it by practice, right? Because sometimes people can spend time theorizing and understand, like thinking, \"Oh, maybe this will work,\" but really you've just kind of tinkered. together and found what were the pieces that kind of made it work, and maybe later on we can talk about, you know, even my personal experience. I, I purchased a nodle and I've recently, you know, been s-setting it up over the last few days with some of your help, but yeah, let's start then, talking about The, the components of the nodal product, let's go into that." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:36", "start": 456.28, "text": "Yeah, so the, the main board we are using now, it's, it's public knowledge, is a Rock 64 with four gigs of RAM. that differentiates it a lot from the Raspberry Pi because we have four times the, the memory amount on the board, and also we have much faster memory. and we also use SSD storage, as everyone knows now, SSD is, progressively replacing hard drives in the world and, and it's much, much faster, especially for access times, and this is very important because when you do initial block download and, and verification of the blockchain Your disk is actually spending a lot of time seeking from one place to another to re-read all the blocks and transactions, and having an SSD removes totally this seek time. that's how we managed to achieve a initial block download in about forty hours in most of the cases. we do have some issues and I kind of tweeted about it, Some time ago, with the reliability of the boards, we actually have twenty to thirty percent of boards which we just trash upon arrival. so it's, the supplier isn't perfect, but we, we use them mostly because they share our, Our belief that we should use open hardware as much as possible and, actually the guys from Pine Sixty Four started with a Indiegogo campaign a few years ago, and one of the goals was to build a really open platform. And, as opposed to the Raspberry Pi, which uses a proprietary, bootloader and, closed Broadcom chipset, the Pine Sixty Four products, and especially the Rock Sixty Four, are using a much more open architecture." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:23", "start": 562.66, "text": "Fantastic. And Michael, can you please just help explain for the listeners what are the benefits there of that more open architecture as opposed to the proprietary, closed-source one?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "09:34", "start": 574.38, "text": "In one phrase, it's don't trust, verify. if you have, if you run a closed architecture or a closed computer, you don't really know what's running in there. the same reason, made us start using the Purism laptop for, for building the node. I just got mine one week ago and, moved all the development to, to this computer because, I can verify exactly what runs on my computer, and, I think this is important for our users too. Probably no one did it yet, but if they want, they can just go in the source code of the bootloader, source code of the chipset, and, and check what's in there." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "10:12", "start": 611.86, "text": "Fantastic. And let's now talk a little bit about the node, all the software, the components that are available inside it. So let's just kind of go piece by piece. So obviously you've got Bitcoin Core, then you've got, what are the The other pieces available or software." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "10:29", "start": 629.49, "text": "So currently we have LND for Lightning, we plan to include C-Lightning as a second choice, in the future, but it's not a, not a top priority right now, even if we have an increasing amount of users asking for it. We have Ride the Lightning, which is a, a magnificent, frontend for LND, it covers, I think, sixty-five percent of the APIs now, you can really go deep in The, in the functioning of LND and when you think you need it, and we have, BTC Pay server as, as a payment processor and, now we also include the fundraising, engine so you can- do your own, fundraising directly on your node. also not directly included on the node, but, something we make easy, to connect is Zap Desktop and, Jool, browser plugin to manage LND and, send and receive transactions. and, we are in the process of, releasing an update with LND Connect, which will allow you to connect just with a QR code to your, app wallet on your, iOS device." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:47", "start": 706.92, "text": "Fantastic stuff, yeah. And so look, maybe now it's a good time for me to discuss a little bit about my own experience. So I bought a nodle, I bought the 500 gig version, I had a great experience, and what, what I noticed is when you fire up the device, you pl- it's, it was quite simple. I mean, you plug it in, plug in the Ethernet port, and plug in the power, turn it on, and off it goes. And then you basically go on the website, which connects like on your internal network Doing all the things like, you know, and the other thing actually that might be a good topic to touch on as well is just around how the user actually installs their, like, installs Bitcoin Core and installs LND and then does IBD. It's not even pre-si-uh, pre-synched. So can you talk to us a little bit about the process that the nodal user goes through to take it from zero to one hundred?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "12:42", "start": 762.33, "text": "Yeah, so the, the idea was to not, not preload anything on the device, so, actually it makes any tampering during, During shipping, totally useless. when the user receives the device, you-- it's kind of an app store type of, experience, even if there are very few apps right now. you just have these tiles on the home screen and, you click on, install service. for Bitcoin D and what it does, it goes to the official releases, repository, downloads it, it checks the checksum of the file, it checks the PGP signature of the release, and then it, it just puts it in the correct places on the, on the disk in the, on the SSD in the node. And it does the same for, for every, every product. For some of them, there is a longer time needed because we compile from source. We don't do That for Bitcoin D because the, the releases are signed and, and the compilation takes about two to three hours on this hardware, so it's not a very good user experience." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "13:58", "start": 838.18, "text": "If someone really wants, he can still compile from source, manually. We will, assist, happily assist everyone in doing that, but it's really not necessary with signed releases. We will also, We s-since we embed the signatures on the device, in our, in our repository, we will sign this repository using Frank Brown's code chain soon, which will allow you to check that, what we provide to you is exactly the same that your neighbors get, making any, any attack on, one particular person, impossible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:38", "start": 878.31, "text": "Fantastic, yeah, that's a, it's a great s-setup in terms of the- The device and it might be interesting now just to talk about how we've got, there's this sort of, there's like an LND stack and then you can kinda go the other pathway with C-Lightning. So the way it is set up now, you've got Bitcoin Core, LND, and then you can, set up Zap to connect to your own personal node and you can obviously set up Jewel to connect there as well. but then I suppose the, the other pathway that you could do is Bitcoin Core, C-Lightning, and then use something like Spark So, are you getting many requests for that, and do you have thoughts on the using that sort of C-Lightning stack?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "15:21", "start": 920.56, "text": "So what's funny is actually the C-Lightning fans are mostly located in Germany and," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "15:29", "start": 929.03, "text": "and we will be meeting them soon, so I, I, I think we'll maybe try to provide this at least in a beta version for, for them, by, by the end of May. but yeah, definitely we need to have both stacks available on the device. SeeLightning has a totally different software architecture, it's more modular, it's, it- It has some advantages over LND. I think it has easier state backup, for example, or even doesn't have all this, state backup problem that LND has right now." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "16:06", "start": 966.24, "text": "The, the idea behind the node is to give the users the, the most choice possible. So we will implement, different, Lightning implementations, and we also want to implement different Bitcoin implementations, for example, BTC-D, which is more space efficient for the future." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:25", "start": 985.2, "text": "Fascinating. so I guess let's now talk about your typical customer. So maybe Askuwheteau, you can cover this one. In your mind, who is the ideal customer for this product?" }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "16:37", "start": 996.97, "text": "I guess you have different types of customers really. Like, we'll see some like anonymous type of customers where- You get a name, you get a PO box, you send the noddle, and never hear from them again. And I think we, we respect that because part of it is, is to be able to service these people, and it doesn't really matter if we don't hear back from them at all. And then you have other people who are like willing to learn, who need some kind of way to get into the whole Bitcoin or Lightning, experience, and who weren't necessarily able to put it up together before, Who will come to us and stick around, ask questions, and on our, our support channel on, on the Telegram channel, you actually see people ask a ton of questions. And then help others out afterwards, which I think is really nice. So, you know, there's a kind of community building behind it, which is, which is really enjoyable to, to see. And from a business perspective, you have, physical businesses, and I think that gives a lot of power to the people 'cause you can run your bar, you can run your restaurant, we have like, a cello professor, Who wants to, to run some of his activities on the, on the model. You can have all sorts of models that are very, conductive to like sovereignty. So that's really, really interesting to us. And, the more physical stores you put on, The better, 'cause I think you can reach some kind of network where some of your customers are actually running the same type of infrastructure, and, I think that's really interesting to us. I know, like, we were looking for merchandise, you know, like selling T-shirts and stuff, everybody else does that. And for a while, we were looking for providers who could, Suppliers who could accept Bitcoin as a payment, 'cause that's what we have, and we try to avoid the whole fiat thing if we can, and we couldn't find anyone. And basically what we're gonna try to set up now, I think that should work, is, one of our clients, Godinautal. And they do that, they, they print shirts and all sorts of merchandising. And we're gonna be able to pass on Bitcoin that we get from our customers to some of our clients. And just building an ecosystem like that of businesses accepting Bitcoin, and that's a big step for us, I think, and to less fiat, you know" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "19:22", "start": 1161.99, "text": "Yeah, I, I think the win for us will be when we'll be in a circular Bitcoin economy in which we'll be just receiving Bitcoin from our clients and passing it to our suppliers, which will pass it to their suppliers and so on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:35", "start": 1174.92, "text": "Yeah, so that's potentially the way it could go, but, you know, it, it may take years and years to get to that point, although obviously there are some people out there who can do that right now. but I suppose let's kind of cut it, cut that down in terms of different types of customers, right? So you You have the enthusiast who, they don't necessarily have a business, but they just want to run a node just for the sake of, you know, having the additional privacy and because they wanna play around with lightning, and then maybe you'll have some- You know, brick and mortar, businesses, and I suppose you might also have some people who want to run an online business. Have you had any, customers who have spoken to you about using the Nodal for that?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "20:19", "start": 1218.84, "text": "So let's, let's start with the first category. I'm really impressed with the enthusiasts part of our customer base. we have Jane in the US who is, A great developer working on privacy co-coins and, she's actually running like four different coins on the node, so it's not even people who want to tinker with L- with Lightning itself, it's people who like the hardware that we came up with and, using it for something totally different. so that's, that's really great. I, I didn't expect it to, to be done so fast actually. about online businesses, we have like a kind of a mixed, mixed customer who is running both his physical businesses to accept payments, through the embedded, BTC Pay server and using the Lightning, node of the NODO for his online BTC Pay server, and this is kind of the, what I call the best of two worlds solution. You host your BTC Pay server online so you don't disclose your IP address of your home and/or business internet connection to the world by running it, inside your network, but you run LND on your node at home or in your business, so the payments don't stay on the online server, they go directly on your, physical node which you can protect physically from the outside world, and this way only the online BTC Pay server knows the IP address of your, LND node, as long as you don't put some extra seed name on it, of course." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:00", "start": 1319.55, "text": "Oh, fascinating, I didn't think about it that way, but it makes total sense when you explain it that way. So in essence, people can set up their website with, you know, the front, the public-facing website, BTC Pay Server, but underneath that is actually what's generating, say, the addresses and generating the, in-payment invoice requests and so on, that can all be done from your actual physical nodal device. I suppose that's, that's what you're getting at there, Michael?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "22:29", "start": 1348.91, "text": "Yeah, yeah. The only thing you have to do is to open the API port of LND on your network and then on BTC Pay Server, you can insert the connection string to your, external, LND nodes to the BTC Pay Server. This way, you can even use the free, BTC Pay Server hosting. You don't even have to, to run a, a local node to the server, you just connect to your own node." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:53", "start": 1373.01, "text": "Fascinating stuff. Yeah, and I, I've just found it really an easy way to get used to and get familiar with using some of these things in the, on the mainnet in the past. I just sort of fiddled around with things on a test net basis, but I, I actually found this personally was quite an easy setup, and yeah, I've also had to play around with Ride the Lightning, that dashboard. I thought that was a really cool dashboard and it, it actually allows you to really see what's happening under the, under the hood, and you can actually break it down in terms of, okay, here's what channels I ha-have open, here are the payments made, here are the, you know, here's the incoming Capacity, here's the outgoing capacity. It's a really, nice setup. do you wanna talk a little bit around, perhaps some of the- The, I guess from a hardware point of view, around, you know, comparing using this Rock 64 and, you know, your hardware approach versus, say, the, the Raspberry approach." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "23:56", "start": 1436.36, "text": "so as I told before, actually the, the main problem I had to solve is the initial block download time. currently, if you have a good storage behind a Raspberry Pi, it will take you somewhere between four and eight weeks with our hardware, you experienced it yourself. I, I don't know what was your particular time, but usually what we hear is forty hours." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:20", "start": 1460.23, "text": "Yeah, for me it was around two days or so, and I think it might have been more about the internet speed than the device, I'm not sure. Yeah, roughly two days. So, yeah, I think that would have been about right." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "24:30", "start": 1469.72, "text": "Yeah, and there's also a luck factor which, which counts a lot because it highly depends on the peers that your node will select to download from. So, sometimes, for example One particular node that you know has a fast internet connection on the other side, or one of your own nodes if you, if you already have one. that, that was really the main, main criteria I had. the other ones are more challenges than, than advantages actually because the Rock sixty-four is running a, a real sixty-four, implementation of Linux for ARM. And many of the things we wanted to run on it are actually not compatible with, sixty-four bits architecture for ARM. for example, BTC Pay Server runs in thirty-two bits and, Because, Microsoft dot net isn't, isn't out of beta yet totally on ARM sixty-four. So small, small things like that which makes our life complicated every day, that's why also, Electrum personal server isn't yet on the node, it's because of some, sixty-four bit dependencies being broken currently on the, on the Linux distribution we're using. but I mean, this, this is what makes the product interesting and, this is why we exist, if it was Of course, easy and just a plug and play install, we, we wouldn't have any work to do." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:57", "start": 1556.64, "text": "Well, yeah, it's giving you a job, hey? okay, and I think the other thing is That there's, there's different, Bitcoin full node products out there, right? So there's the Casa product, the Casa node, there is, Bitseed, and I know Bitseed are, are pairing or partnering with Samurai to do the Dojo product. obviously there is, you know, it'd be remiss of me not to mention my good friend Pierre Rochard and his node launcher as well. So there's many different options out there. Can you just comment a little bit on where you sort of see the- model compared to some of the other, devices." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "26:37", "start": 1597.21, "text": "I think the node is a really r-ready to use business solution, even if we still have a solid, user base in the, in the enthusiasts and bitcoiners, I, I think the, the real goal of the product is businesses. the Casa node is, is really a big part of the multi-sig system. I think it's not sold anymore as a- A separate product, you have to subscribe, Keymaster subscription now to, to get it. the Dojo is kind of a different type of product because, I mean, in the Bitcoin, I think it comes pre-synced, although the hardware would allow you to sync it yourself in a reasonable time, because it's, it's a X eighty-six or PC-based product." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:32", "start": 1651.52, "text": "I, I think the closest actually to the feature set of the node is, Piroschka's launcher because, I, I didn't, I, I don't like to look at other products when I develop something because it tends to influence me and, I like to do something on my own. So I looked at his, interface after I made the node and actually there are many similarities. It's pretty funny. for example, this, jewel and zap connect features are very close to what we did." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "28:04", "start": 1684.2, "text": "And yeah, it's, it's a very nice product. It's more for recycling your old PC, but, fe-feature wise, it's very close. And, we have other hardware products coming actually. we have another rack, coming. It's more for the, for a data center situation. it's X sixty, X eighty-six, so p, PC based, server with, re- full redundancy. So we have a double storage, double motherboards, double power supply, It's more for an online business who owns his own servers and wants to have a, a payment processor i-in a box for his, hosted architecture. It can also be used in some big business, for example, some, big store who wants some, rack mount solution instead of a small box, and redundancy because they rely on the Lightning payments for, for their business. so this is, this is coming pretty fast, and we'll also, provide it in a hosted version, so you will, the same as you can set up your BTC Pay server with your Bitcoin and LND full node, on some virtual server today, you will be able to rent it from us on a physical server. as you may know, any type of virtual server can be broken. It's just a matter of time. people can go out from the-- For, for example, if you co-host it on a physical server, your virtual server can one day potentially be accessed by a person who has a virtual server on the same physical server you have. Amazon had some critical upgrades, to solve these kind of problems, Azure had, it's just a matter of time before all the virtualization systems will be broken, and then fixed, but it'll be too late if your coins are stolen meanwhile. So we believe in a cheap dedicated hardware instead of, cheap, virtual servers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:18", "start": 1817.65, "text": "Yeah, that's a really fascinating point. That's something that I have- I have heard of in terms of the cloud, in, you know, cloud service provision, so-software as a service. I've heard of some of these scenarios where, in, in a scenario where the device is multi-tenanted or the hard, you know, the, environment is multi-tenanted and, people talk about this concept of, of the hypervisor breaking and, you know, a, a, a hacker or someone sort of getting into not just one company's, you know, customer's data, but Other customers, you know, so let's say Amazon had multiple customers and their data was all on one, you know, two or three different ones or whoever, and where that hack happens, then actually they're, they're, they're not just-- it's not just one customer of theirs whose data has gotten hacked, it's multiple. So that's a, it's an interesting point that you make there. And, the other interesting one that came to my mind when you mentioned there around full redundancy, I suppose that is also a, a benefit for somebody who wants to run a more More, let's call it, well, a more high-performing Lightning router as well. So let's say you want to be more like a routing ho-hub and you want that redundancy just because obviously there's a little bit more of a situation around the backups at this point, but that's perhaps, a feature there as well" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:41", "start": 1901.14, "text": "Yeah, totally. And there is another thing, at least for c-lightning, we will probably see the first hardware lightning wallets coming on the market pretty soon. There is a lot of work happening around that right now. and you can't plug a hardware wallet in a virtual server." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:02", "start": 1922.09, "text": "Right, and so in this case, then you're basically implying there that most businesses would either want to host, you know, actually have the physical server in their own premises, or they would- Well, in that case they would, because obviously they've got the hardware wallet, and where they're comfortable not having the hardware wallet, then they could potentially rent a physical server from you guys at the Nodal team." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "32:27", "start": 1947.28, "text": "Yeah, totally. And with the included hardware wallet or, or, signing device to connect directly to this physical server. O-obviously there is still a lot of work around this to, to prove that we actually provide the physical nodes to the customer, but that's something we're working on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:50", "start": 1970.05, "text": "Fascinating stuff. And can you tell us a little bit, I, I'm not as familiar, obviously I've heard of this concept of the hardware lightning wallet, can you outline a little bit just for the listeners who aren't as familiar on what that is and how it might work?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:05", "start": 1984.84, "text": "so the only thing I know about it is what I heard at HCPP18 from Stepan, who were-- who was working on it at the time. basically from what I understand, in a Lightning, the, the key signing part is a separate module, and they just move it to the hardware instead of running it in a, in a software library." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:28", "start": 2007.78, "text": "okay, interesting." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:29", "start": 2008.7, "text": "So every time some transactions comes to the nodes to be routed, it goes, to be signed inside the- The hardware device and then out. Obviously it's not perfect because this dev- this hardware device has to be always on. You will not go to sign manually every time some transaction is routed by your node." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:47", "start": 2027.04, "text": "Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Okay, and then, so I suppose coming back to sort of full circle in terms of comparison of the Nodal with some of the other products out there, I guess one of the key differentiators, as I understand you, then, is really around making the product work for a business user. So right now, let's say the Casa is probably more, Casa and the Bitseed products are probably more targeted towards an individual, whereas the Nodal product, because obviously you can run BTC Pay server On it, and it's very sort of one-click install built into the product, it's probably very well suited for a business user." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "34:26", "start": 2066.14, "text": "Yeah, and, and this is really how we want to help, adoption of Bitcoin in physical businesses. We, we want to go, we, we hope to go one day door-to-door and just propose physical businesses to, to implement Lightning for them and allow them to, to accept payments. In the, in the box you receive the Bitcoin accepted- Here, sticker. It's a sticker designed to be, glued to the front door of a business, the same as Visa or Amex. and this is really what we want to have." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:00", "start": 2099.81, "text": "Fantastic. And I think also from a price point of view, then, let's talk about kind of the differentiators there. So let's say you're a business owner and your, you can either buy the nodal product for something like four or five hundred dollars. I guess really the only other alternative would be if they were to just have an old laptop lying around, and they would use that, but ultimately- If they weren't gonna do use a NodeL product, they would otherwise have to buy sort of a full-on computer, and that might cost a little bit more than what kind of the NodeL product is, and it might not be as kind of one-click install." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "35:42", "start": 2141.85, "text": "Yeah, I, I'm not sure actually this is what they would do. They would probably, just, host their payment solution online, on some cheap, VPS server. like you can do there is this one-click install for BTC Pay Server on Luna Node, for example. I think this is the our, our main competitor in this field, But we, we can kind of solve it by factorizing, a hardware node between many businesses. For example, if you have one street with ten or twenty shops, each making a few transactions per day, they could agree on buying one together and, putting it in one place and just all connect to, to one physical node. not necessarily having one box in every business." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:31", "start": 2191.42, "text": "Right. Yeah. And I think the other thing is obviously many of my listeners aren't just kind of the normal person, they're typically Bitcoin enthusiasts, and so for them it's a good idea for them to have an understanding of the different products that are available and the different, you know, software, such that when their friends who aren't so familiar with Bitcoin ask them, they can recommend the right tool for the job. So that's kind of what I- That I was hoping to get out there just to kind of delineate between some of the different options. so I suppose for some of my listeners, they might like to, if they've got, a merchant coming to them and asking what's a good way to do it, well, this might be a good option in that case. okay, so maybe let's talk now a little bit about things like, Sales volumes and kind of how you're going so far over the first six months and sort of where you see it going. Maybe, Askuwheteau, you can, add some comments on that." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "37:26", "start": 2245.95, "text": "Yeah, well We don't really discuss the, the whole sales volume kind of, sure, you know, details, but," }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "37:37", "start": 2257.04, "text": "we're, we're still in, in this phase, I guess, that's Almost like a testing phase, in the sense that we are selling products and we're following up on it, et cetera. But I guess that the crowd that we're, we're really talking to right now is still really enthusiastic or people who have a fairly good understanding of Bitcoin. we don't sell for anything else than Bitcoin for the, for the time being, for example, meaning that In a way, we're kind of filtering who our customers are. you know, we, we've had a few people reach out to us saying, \"Oh, can, do you accept credit card payments, et cetera?\" And we've actually turned them down. Because, I guess the timing wasn't necessarily right, we wanna make sure we get it right, and, you know, there was a lot of testing before we launched. And in a way, we're still testing, you know? So w-we wanna be cautious. the thought process behind it was, we wanna make sure when we launch something, that it actually works. 'cause reputation is really important and, you know, there has to be some kind of follow-up on, on our side. but the, the reception has been Overwhelmingly positive, and I think at first we were pretty surprised, and really helped us, or convinced us to, to move further, You know, along this, this path, we weren't sure exactly where we were going at first, 'cause it's still a, a small operation. I mean, it's the two of us, it's organic, there's no funding at all, So, you know, it's maybe slightly different than other businesses you see around in this, in, in this space. it's really a small project for the moment that's, you know, getting bigger, but, We have to nurture it in a way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:37", "start": 2376.91, "text": "Fantastic. And I, I noticed really that the support channels and so on are quite, well, it's well supported, right? So there's a Telegram group and you can just join there and post your questions and, my experience was pretty good in terms of, getting help to set things up and, you know, obviously there's, you'll, any of the listeners, you'll probably recognize a few of the faces in the Telegram chat group if you come in, if you buy a nodle and you come in group for the support on that. did you have any other comments just around how it's going with the early adopter customers?" }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "40:14", "start": 2413.71, "text": "Well, the thing is, I guess, you know, the chat rooms a good experience and, and I think you learn a lot there, but, like, the Nautilus is like this dedicated, always-on type of device, you know, and that's really the whole concept and the design behind it, but The support channel is pretty much always on too, and, and one thing is like Ketominer never sleeps, so he's pretty active there. And he's helped a lot of people around. And like I, as I said earlier, it's, you, you see other people now who've been helped by some of the users helping other people too. So I think the whole learning experience for us and for everyone else i-is, is really good, and it can only get better. As long as, you know, the products, the features continue being de-developed, I think your future looks bright. You know, it's-- like six months is a very short period of time, and there's been already a lot of change. In the p-in the product and in the feature set. So, it's fast, it's really fast." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:19", "start": 2479.21, "text": "Yeah, that is- And I don't" }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "41:20", "start": 2480.18, "text": "think any of those nodes existed like just a year ago, you know? There's a space. And I think it's encouraging to also see the other nodes around, because they're different, and we'll see in five, ten years, you know, where all these go, but I think they're here to stay. And a lot of the features that are different are by choice, by design, and everybody's coming from a different, you know, perspective. and I think that's what, what's really interesting, and for the end users, I think it holds a lot of promise that someone's gonna figure out something that's gonna be perfect for them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:59", "start": 2518.96, "text": "Excellent. And, maybe we could just talk now about any common sticking points when people are setting up. Maybe, Michael, you could comment on, any advice you have for listeners who, when they buy the node, all things to watch out for when they're setting it up." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "42:14", "start": 2534.05, "text": "I think the main thing to, to consider is to running a UPS, device, you know, an, an interruptible power supply, like some APC or Eaton or, or anything. You don't need a Big one, any smallest model will do because the node is, consuming only five watts. do yourself a favor and plug your router and your node into, into the UPS. This way, if you have a power cut or a power surge, you won't fry everything. the only Case we had a device coming back to us, to fix is after a power cut during an upgrade. so th-this is really the main, main thing to consider. Also, if you have a power cut during some writing in, Bitcoin D files, they can become corrupt sometimes and you may have to re-sync from scratch. So it's really a small investment, it's fifty to one hundred dollars tops, and it will-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:20", "start": 2600.04, "text": "Right, and especially if the, you don't wanna lose the, the amount of money that you have in lightning channels at the mo- at the point that you have a power cut, right?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "43:30", "start": 2609.98, "text": "So you, you won't lose any money if the device comes back up one day, by how Lightning is designed, but it increases the risk of data corruption on the, on the drive, so, that, that's the main risk actually." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "43:45", "start": 2625.45, "text": "okay, right, yeah. I was just thinking more like if you accidentally, you know, publish, an out of date state in Lightning and then your channel partner punishes you by, you know, you know, if you weren't intentionally trying to scam them, but if you're- Channel partner then, their software then punishes you, then perhaps you could lose money that way as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:07", "start": 2647.26, "text": "Yeah, so, so the only case that that would happen, I think, is if you, manually make some backup and, restore it at the previous state, which we don't really allow users to do except if they have some, better knowledge of, Linux command line. Right. So anyway, that, that, that's a pretty, Right, it's" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:27", "start": 2667.18, "text": "a bit more of a niche or a very rare case, yeah, understood. Okay." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "44:32", "start": 2671.62, "text": "So, I, I do my, Elizabeth Stark for just one minute. Don't put more money in Lightning that you can't afford to lose anyway." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:41", "start": 2680.61, "text": "Yes, it is still hashtag reckless. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about future features coming in the Nodle. I think one that I have heard around the community is Electrum Personal Server. have you got any other ideas, what's coming up? Oh, and obviously you mentioned c-lightning as well." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "45:02", "start": 2701.96, "text": "Yeah, so see Lightning EPS, but one really big feature coming, very soon, like, it's actually running in our test devices, we are just waiting for mainnet, is the Ripple Mixer from, Samurai guys. so basically that- That's a kind of a challenge for us, because it means you will have some private keys on the node, which you don't have now, except for Lightning. but if you run the embedded BTC-Pay server, you can set your, Samway wallet address as a, as a payment address, and then all the coins you receive in your BTC-Pay server will be mixed by Willepool automatically. or you can just, use the same seed as on your Samway wallet. On, on the Ripple Mix on your, node and, you have a node with on Mix running, so any transaction you receive on your phone on Samurai will be automatically mixed on your, on your node and put back in your wallet." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:04", "start": 2764.24, "text": "Wow, that's fascinating. So, yeah, that's really cool, 'cause I, yeah, I knew the Samurai guys were looking to, obviously, do that sort of stuff in their Dojo node product, and I knew they were looking to open source it, but I suppose it sounds like you have, you're looking" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "46:22", "start": 2781.7, "text": "Yeah, so, so they provided the binaries to us to test, they are very happy about the results and, we hope that mainnet will be launched pretty soon." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:30", "start": 2790.33, "text": "That's excellent. So can you tell us a little bit about how that would work? So let's say the user has, obviously, they've bought the node or they've set it up, they've run BTC Pay server, and then they would put in, would it be some kind of setting up the same Memnon exceed on the node product as what they have on their phone, and then the payments that come to their And would be mixed by the device or how, how would that work?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "46:55", "start": 2814.67, "text": "Yeah, exactly. Since, since the seed defines the, the wallet, you actually just provide the same seed phrase to, to the node and it will be encrypted and stored inside the, the Weop product. And then you export your xPub key from your Samurai wallet and you insert it in, BTC Pay. Actually, you can do that with any BTC Pay, doesn't have to, to be the one from the nodes. It's, it's all the same wallet. you just use the, BTC Pay just using your xPub to generate addresses for you, to, to generate addresses, yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:29", "start": 2848.92, "text": "Fantastic stuff. And" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "47:30", "start": 2850.14, "text": "then it comes into your, say, wallet, it got mixed, it get mixed, and, I think it's not yet implemented in the, in the Android wallet, but it will be coming at the same time as, Ripple Main Net. You will have a flag on each of your transactions on your wallet to tell you if it's mixed or not." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:47", "start": 2867.49, "text": "Yeah, that's really cool. I can f- foresee, I, I understand you, right now it sounds like you're mainly targeting towards business users, but, if, if, if that sort of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:59", "start": 2878.8, "text": "Being interested in this product as well, because then it helps from a privacy point of view massively." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "48:04", "start": 2884.14, "text": "Yeah, of course. And one thing we are doing, for example, on our online store is, so currently we don't have Ripple mainnet yet, so we are using Wasabi Wallet, but all the payments we receive from customers on, Nodal Store, we, we mix in Wasabi Wallet. So I think anyway, you, you not only do yourself a favor by mixing the coins you receive, but you also help the people who sent you the coins." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:29", "start": 2908.56, "text": "Exactly, because you're helping increase the size of the anonymity set." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "48:33", "start": 2913.3, "text": "Yeah, and you protect the privacy of your customers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:37", "start": 2916.74, "text": "Yeah, that's a really, interesting point because I think, some have commented, I believe Francis Pouliot has been discussing some of that as a concept as well of whether a Bitcoin exchange should try to mix customer coins for the sake of maintaining their own customers' privacy. So it's an interesting point you raise around whether Bitcoin businesses in general should try to think Think of ways to use coin mixing, coin join, etcetera, to help do the same." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:06", "start": 2945.95, "text": "Yeah, totally. I think anyway in a, in a Bitcoin economy, or you do it, fully and, and you respect that, or, or just don't do it at all." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:17", "start": 2956.88, "text": "Yeah, yeah. Fascinating stuff, guys. That's really interesting. And I suppose let's turn now a little bit to the future of these products. So I think you were touching on this a little bit in terms of making some of the products available for businesses using the nodal rack. do you have any other thoughts to add on that kind of idea of where you see all these kind of node as, as a product, or node as a service products?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "49:46", "start": 2985.64, "text": "I, I, I think as the demand will grow for big businesses, we will just iterate on the, on the rack. Today it's a very small power product, to be, to be able to sell it and run it on the budget," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "50:02", "start": 3002.32, "text": "But, we hope seeing some big businesses coming to Bitcoin and Lightning one day, and they will require totally different kind of hardware. we kind of announced last year, a very big, rack mount server, but, I mean, we, we can implement it right now if someone asks, but we don't provide it as a ready-to-to-buy product, because we are talking a twenty-thousand-dollar product. It's not something we can keep in stock, just for fun, so we can build it to order, but, yeah, I think this is really the, the main thing. why not seeing some Walmart or, I don't know, Costco or some chain like that having some, big node rack in their main data center which is processing all the payments? That, that would be the, the dream evolution for me." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "50:59", "start": 3058.63, "text": "Or a large shopping mall or something like that with tons of different stores. And different users, different owners." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "51:06", "start": 3066.0, "text": "Yeah, one, one thing we're working actively on too is, being able to run multiple Lightning, nodes on one node because, as you may know, it's a custodial, product. La, la, la-- a Lightning node is a custodial product. So if you run BTC Pay and Lightning on your node, you won't be able to have only one node, one Lightning node today, for all the- Users of BTC Pay Server and BTC Pay Server is multi-tenant, so if you have some group of stores that use one node, they would have to share one Lightning node and then split the funds somehow after they cash out the, the channels so we are pro- we are working on a solution to have multiple Lightning, demons running on one device. right," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:59", "start": 3118.93, "text": "yeah. So it's, yeah, I guess you are trying to help, each, i-in that example, you could have each shop kind of having their own little- Instance, if you will, of Lightning LND running rather than having to share and then therefore having to have it all hosted into the same BTC Pay server." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "52:18", "start": 3138.34, "text": "Yeah. A- another thing we have to work on is, user education around Lightning itself, because, people don't really get, the channels concept, right. And sometimes we have users coming and, saying, \"Okay, so I've opened one channel, to X.\" And I can't receive payments, and we have to explain that it's normal because the funds are on your side, not on the other side. The next RTLUX and, should help with that because you will see each channel and the, and the cursor of the balance on each channel, right or left. but, we hope to help that too with a channel opening service. So when you get your node, you'll be able to request a channel from us to you. we have some pretty well connected nodes, and then you'll be able to receive, payments without thinking about it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:13", "start": 3192.86, "text": "Oh, okay, so it's sort of similar to Thor's Bitrefill service, where they will open the channel to you to provide you that incoming capacity." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:22", "start": 3201.56, "text": "Yeah, totally." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:22", "start": 3201.91, "text": "Yeah, that's an interesting one. And," }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "53:24", "start": 3204.15, "text": "and, and that's, that's how we partly reinvest the funds we get from our customers. Actually, we, we allow some percentage of, all the sales of nodes to open new channels." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "53:35", "start": 3215.06, "text": "Oh, it's really, clever. Very, very good foresight there. And I think the other thing to add there is just that Lightning is still early. We are still using single funded channels, right? once we have dual funded channels, then a lot of this concept of people, like users having to do manual channel management, some of that will go away because they won't have to think so deeply about, \"Oh, okay, I've opened a channel this way, but do I have incoming capacity and so on?\" but yeah, I, I think the-- Just to touch on education, Askuwheteau, do you wanna just touch, touch on, education for your users and perhaps how your company can help, Teach them, to kind of learn Bitcoin the right way." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "54:22", "start": 3262.34, "text": "Well, yeah, m-maybe it ties into that too, is like one last aspect for, for the previous question kind of is, The, the whole concept of being open in, in, you know, being customizable, upgradable, et cetera, as a product is Customers from Nodal are going to be able to benefit from the features that are going to be built by people other than us who are gonna come up with great new products or, or services. And It's hard to predict the future when it's gonna be created by someone else. but as a customer, you're gonna benefit from that as soon as it's ported to the platform, really. So I think that's really interesting. And so you're gonna get services, products, and the added knowledge and benefit of this still being very new, and we're pretty much all learning together at the same time. then as far as, is like how we can help, I think putting up some large businesses onto the nodel and documenting it, and showing other people how you do it, and what are the benefits, and how different it is to run a Bitcoin business really. then, that the traditional fiat business, I think would be, would be very beneficial for everybody, be-cuz we're gonna learn along the way too. You know, right now our business is a Bitcoin business, and, and we're learning too. it, it's hard to convert large amounts of, Bitcoin every day, while kind of staying under the radar. That's one problem we have to deal with. So there's lots of stuff to learn, and not everything's technical. A lot has to do with the setup, and, and I think eve everybody benefits from those lessons, so we need to share more, maybe." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:16", "start": 3375.82, "text": "Yeah, and I, I just think just in general, it's a great way for people to learn about Bitcoin and Lightning just by, you know, using the product and buying a nodal and giving it a go, and then in some ways, you're helping monetize the education of people to some extent, because you're providing support for those users as well, so they can kind of get familiar with how to use LND or see Lightning and these different products, and I think that's, a nice way for more and more people to kind of learn about Bitcoin. so look, we're coming close to the end of time, so I'll just give you guys a chance just if you have any sort of closing thoughts and you know, you wanna finish and just mention some of the key benefits of the model, and obviously just mention also for the listeners where they can find you guys." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "57:01", "start": 3420.9, "text": "Well, I guess for the model, what you're getting right now is a device that's dedicated to running Bitcoin Lightning and, you know, adding more features and services along the way. But as of today, as an individual or as a business Fairly easily, you know, let's not kid ourselves, it's, it's still a process, but, fairly easily you can run your business and you can do it by yourself, It helps sovereignty, it helps privacy, it'll be even better when you go through Whirlpool, et cetera. But, that's what we're going for, you know, individual freedom and privacy." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "57:44", "start": 3464.08, "text": "the best thing people can do is just come talk to us and, you know, we need to talk more, we need to be available And just reach out, you know, i-i-it's fairly easy to contact us, so, and we're more than happy to, to meet people and discuss all these things." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "58:02", "start": 3481.78, "text": "Yeah, and I would just add, don't be scared because we, we believe in self-hosting everything, so we aren't on GitHub, we have our own private GitLab server. Don't hesitate to create accounts on there, we won't spy on you, we won't keep logs of what you're doing, just come request features, Fix bugs if you want to, everything is open, everything is, out there, so just, just come to talk to us on Telegram. We also support people not having nodes and just, playing with Lightning. We have a great community of, other developers. We have Richard Meyers from Gotenna, we have Jack Marrows from Zap on our Telegram channel. it's a really great community, and we're very happy to have them." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:47", "start": 3527.28, "text": "Fantastic. And perhaps if you could just finish with With the website, and so the listeners know where they can go if they wanna buy a nodle." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "58:56", "start": 3535.59, "text": "So Nodle dot IT is the website, the main website?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:01", "start": 3540.55, "text": "Excellent. Alright, well, I'll, I'll make sure all the links to that are in the show notes as well. and yeah, look, thanks very much, guys. I think you guys are doing a great job at helping, make it easy for newbies to set up and use Bitcoin and Lightning. And thanks again for coming on the show." }, { "speaker": "askuwheteau_ketominer", "time": "59:19", "start": 3558.66, "text": "Oh, thanks for having us, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "59:20", "start": 3560.31, "text": "Thank you for having us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:22", "start": 3562.07, "text": "I hope you got some knowledge out of that conversation with the Nodle team, and if you aren't already fully noted, I hope you're now inspired to run a full node. So my hope is that we see an ecosystem of many high quality full node options in Bitcoin, and I wanna help encourage listeners to be aware of those options. So the chances are, if you're listening to my podcast, you're more likely to be a hardcore Bitcoiner, so within your group of friends, you're probably the one they'd come to For Bitcoin advice. So my suggestion is, let's be equipped with the knowledge around some of the different products and use that to select the right tool from the toolbox for the job. So some of the options, as I see them, there's obviously Pierre Rochard's Node Launcher, it's probably the cheapest of the options, it's great software, it's easy to install on a Windows or a Mac, it's ideal if your newbie friend has an old laptop or a PC lying around. Remember, they don't have to leave the PC on all the time, even if it's only on six hours a You got the Casa option, which is a great option if you wanna join the Casa sort of ecosystem with multi-signature and that, and they've got a very nice, easy pre-sync and setup with Bitcoin and Lightning. There's the coming Dojo product from Bitseed and Samurai Wallet, that'll be useful for those concerned with privacy. It'll have things like Whirlpool mixing and the ability to pair your phone wallet with the device, that'll be nifty. And then obviously you got the Nodle, which is perhaps a little more expensive than the Casa, but also a more powerful hardware, and In that it's got BTC Pay Server, so it's very handy for merchants or anyone looking to set up to take online donations in a fully self-hosted, self-sovereign, fully validating way. So if you're interested in the nodle, check them out, the links are in the show notes, it's nodle dot IT. As usual, if you enjoyed the podcast, make sure you share it on Twitter, Telegram, forums, Reddit, etcetera, follow or DM me on Twitter, my handle is at stephan livera, and the show notes are stephan livera" } ] }