{ "episodeId": "SLP640", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "nick_slaney": { "name": "Nick Slaney", "role": "guest", "tag": "NICK" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.15, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast brought to you by Bold. For American listeners, you can buy Bitcoin over at getbold.io. Now, joining me on the show is Nick Slaney. Nick is formerly of C equals, which is kind of like a subsidiary or part of a team under Block. And now Nick is, focused on Lightning adoption nowadays and has a lot of interesting thoughts and I think some interesting insights to share on, you know, Bitcoin and Lightning and where it's going. So, first off, welcome to the show, Nick. Thanks, Stefan. Thanks for having me. So let's just talk a little bit about Lightning, where it is today. What I find really funny is this big disparity between maybe the things you might hear people say on Twitter about- Or on X rather on about how, oh, nobody's using it, or maybe there are a lot of people who maybe they can use it, but they're not. A-and then kind of the on-the-ground reality. So I'm curious if you have anything, if you wanna spell out your thoughts there on the progress in Lightning." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "01:19", "start": 79.48, "text": "Yeah, I think 2024 was a hard time for Lightning, and I think there are a lot of factors that contributed. Lisa Nugget put it best recently when she said, \"Um, there's just a lot of people out there who have a lot to gain by kind of putting down Lightning,\" and we see that now. Everyone who has a new L2, they're talking about the, drawbacks of Lightning and the limitations. And there are limitations, but, I think Lightning has come really far in the past Last year, and it's been really impressive, if you saw the, the River, Bitcoin report, right, that just came out a few days ago. Three point" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:57", "start": 117.49, "text": "five x in volume, something like this?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "02:00", "start": 119.55, "text": "Yeah, more than three and a half x in volume, which is super impressive. And we were at block and C equals, we were seeing this and just seeing what was going on on Twitter, everyone saying Lightning's dead, no one's using it, and then to see like what was happening with our node, it was just so hard to, So hard to rectify what was being said versus what was ac-actually happening." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:24", "start": 143.65, "text": "Yeah. Now, the big one there is that a lot of Lightning volume isn't public, right? And so what people would do, and this is kind of like the, the classic sort of shitcoiner thing, is they would be like, \"Oh, look, Lightning has very low, quote unquote, TVL, total value locked.\" And, I mean, that was always a bad metric, right? Because people were comparing things in terms of like leverage and kind of levering up and this kind of thing with What is a transactional payments protocol primarily, right? That's mainly what Lightning is, and so really a better metric is throughput, right? It's not about like the size of that channel, it's more about like how much back and forth is there. And I guess that's, that's just hard to prove to people, or at least it's not as public, unless the participants or the route, you know, people in the route also just dox that info, and why would they? Because maybe that's a competitive piece of information that they- They would rather not dox." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "03:19", "start": 199.4, "text": "Yeah, that's why I'm happy that River does this report every year and goes ask, goes and asks people, \"Hey, what was your volume?\" And it's always anonymized, it's not actually sharing directly what payments we're going through, but, being able to access that data is super crucial. And yeah, it's, people, it's easy to misunderstand how Lightning works because you have total value locked and you have a certain amount of Bitcoin in channels, but in reality, you know what? One Bitcoin channel can move tens or even hundreds of Bitcoin if the liquidity is going to the right place. So it's very easy to kind of look at Lightning and say, \"Oh, you know, things are going down, it's not going so good,\" when in reality, more and more people are using it every day" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:05", "start": 245.39, "text": "I see. And so what do you see as the truth in terms of the, you know, the trade-offs? Now, obviously there are certain downside trade-offs that you take with Lightning. For example, the inbound liquidity problem, there's this liveness requirement, right? Your server must be online in order to, you know, sign and, update channel states, and, things like routing, things like, okay, if the chain fees go high, sometimes that would cause lightning nodes to sort of close down the channel, and that would cause, you know, these kinds of, you know, there, there are all these little trade-offs and things. Where, what, what do you think is the realistic, current state of play with some of these trade-offs?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "04:50", "start": 290.02, "text": "I think it's gotten a lot better. I think the past year, I was actually just talking to Ben Carmen yesterday, and we were talking about Mutiny and how Mutiny was such a pioneer in Lightning, probably one of the first really major LDK wallets out there that, used a, a web interface, it was really good, but they also hit a lot of the sharp edges of Lightning that have been smoothed over more recently Recently, like the chain spikes, the fee spikes, taking out lightning channels, the forks closes, things like that. But, you know, with recent updates, with anchor channels, with zero fee commitments that Bashi are talking out about now, I think things are getting a lot better for lightning. you also see a lot of people, Matt Corallo talked about this recently, kind of using, more custodial elements to try to handle lightning. I think Breeze is now, doing more- Mostly Liquid, there are a lot of people using Liquid now to do Lightning and Bolts and swaps, so there are ways to get a very easy experience now. I also am pretty bullish on what you can do with an LSP. I think we've had a lot of LSPs that unfortunately had to leave the market, Phoenix had to leave the US, I think there's still a lot there, and I think now, I talk about the spin of the article, I think now is probably one of the best times to be leaning back into this and making Lightning work well." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:16", "start": 375.78, "text": "So I guess just to set the context for listeners who aren't as familiar with some of these things, like for people who are more of a, a layman per se, they're not, as deep into this world like you or I are, like you or I," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:30", "start": 390.16, "text": "So I guess the, probably the big ones really, the Samurai Wallet case and the Tornado Cash case. So these were kind of big cases over the last couple of years where developers were being prosecuted for non-custodial open-source software that they had put out into the world, and this arguably spooked A bunch of different Lightning and Bitcoin companies. So Phoenix left the US, I think Wallet of Satoshi left the US, you know, there was probably this chilling effect that other people were sort of like, if they were about to go into Lightning, then they sort of backed off Do you want to explain a bit of that? What is the fallout of that? Where, you know, where, where are we standing right now?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "07:16", "start": 435.98, "text": "Yeah, Tornado Cash and Samurai Wallet. I mean, both of those cases involve people who are running non-custodial services, and they, you know, probably aren't the best examples of upstanding, when upstanding Bitcoin business would do. but the facts of the case revolve around, hey, if you have a non-custodial service- Are you supposed to be treated like a bank or a financial institution? And the real issue here is FinCEN in twenty nineteen said, \"Hey, if it's not custodial, it can't be a financial institution, it can't be a bank.\" But the DOJ more recently, and this is actually a big theme of, the new administration in the US, they wanted to go after people who were doing crypto things, and the DOJ took a very harsh stance on what money trans- Transmission is that, you know, it go-- it flies in the face of what FinCEN said the limits of that, those definitions were. And, you know, it's one thing for FinCEN to say something, but when the DOJ is, taking you to court over it, it becomes, very real for people. So I think that was a big reason why Phoenix left the US because they didn't wanna tangle with that, uncertainty. And I'm hoping that the current administration can be better about those sort of things. Things, because when it comes down to it, you know, Tornado Cash and Samurai are very abstract concepts for most people, but I think most people can understand self-custody. They can understand that when you have, you know, a wad of cash or something in your house, the government doesn't have the right to come and take that away from you or make sure you have, the right ID on it and, you know, know exactly how much money you have. So, you know, I think the hope is those things get better, with an administration Right." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:11", "start": 550.68, "text": "And I, I, I'm not a lawyer, I'm not an expert on these cases at all, but I've seen some comment that maybe the DOJ was overreaching in terms of what, you know, they should be able to do in that, in those, in those specific cases, and kind of that it would leave these really weird implications, right? Like that, you know, maybe telecommunications providers or, you know, it would be really weird, right? Like if Toyota was held liable for what a- Toyota driver did to like injure some innocent person that Toyota somehow, it, it, it sort of, it, it, it is like a weird thing, and I guess because, because this is software, it's kind of a concept and it's not as easy for people to grasp as like a physical thing, and so maybe that's part of the, the confusion. But anyway, to, to the, to a point you made, hopefully in the, the Trump administration with More favorable pro Bitcoin, pro crypto administration, maybe these things will turn around, and hopefully we'll start to see more building. So I guess on the positive side then, do you want to explain a little bit of what you see as the opportunities then around Lightning businesses for twenty twenty-five and onwards?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "10:24", "start": 624.27, "text": "I think LSPs should make a comeback. I think an LSP, I'm not a lawyer either, but, you know, I've spent a lot of time talking to lawyers at this point. I think LSPs are probably the most legally defensible non-custodial service you can have. People are holding their own keys, we're providing tools to let them use their keys and use their money, we're never holding their money, and I think that can be a really viable business. There's a lot of, again, there's been a lot of fud Even LSPs, like it's gonna take too much money to do this, but in reality, I think it's one of the most capital efficient ways you can serve many, many self custody users. I actually wrote a post on No sir, I should bring it over to X, about John Carvalho's tweet where he said, \"Hey, this is gonna cost millions and millions of dollars to bring people on,\" and it goes back to Lightning liquidity being a little difficult to understand. In reality, you don't have to put Put up, a certain amount of, you have to put up an initial allocation for every user you bring onto Lightning, but as they're using Lightning and as those channels change balance, you recoup your investment, and the job of a really good LSP is to keep their capital in active channels. And, from what we saw at Block, that, is potentially It's not easy, but a lot more realistic than the absolute torture case of, okay, everyone's holding all their money on Lightning and they're not moving it all, and I've just invested all this money and it's not going anywhere, and I have to pay, you know, interest on it or something like that. I guess." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:05", "start": 725.34, "text": "Right. I see. And just to explain a little bit of that, the idea is in Lightning, when you open a channel with somebody, this LSP, the concept is that the LSP might open the channel to the end user. At the end, you know, the guy with the phone and, you know, so on, and they're helping facilitate these transactions, and the idea is that they may, they may clip the ticket, they may charge a fee on transactions, obviously it's a business model. And so I guess the point you're making is that instead of just kind of up front-fronting all this capital with no revenue at all, that Businesses and LSPs could be a little more selective and a little more strategic in how they do that and sort of offer capital when there's revenue coming rather than just kind of offering capital and just Speculatively hoping, y-y-y-- now, to-- I'm tripping over the words a little bit, but in, in a sense, you are speculating, but I guess the point is you can know with better certainty certain customers are going to actually return revenue on that channel and others maybe not so much. especially if you know-- So I guess, can you explain a little bit on how the LSP would know that? Like, how would the L-- how is the LSP meant to know, this will be profitable or not? least likely a profitable channel, and this will be an unprofitable channel, so let's not engage there." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "13:25", "start": 805.34, "text": "It's hard to know exactly upfront, but you are able to manage your liquidity as you go. So splicing, even offline splicing, would allow you to pull investment out of channels that aren't super active. Also, in my Sats dot Build post, I talked a bit about maybe bringing back hosted channels, so someone who is a very casual user who maybe doesn't even have enough Bitcoin Bitcoin to actually, have self-custody in the first place. So can you just explain what is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:55", "start": 834.94, "text": "a hosted channel?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "13:56", "start": 836.22, "text": "Absolutely. So a hosted channel is a way to let someone use Lightning, like the end user is still having a Lightning client, a Lightning node, but we hold off a bit on broadcasting the underlying transaction. So it's custodial, but I think if you keep it to a level where people aren't actually able to even self-custody their Bitcoin, like if you have less- Than a thousand sats, you're not able to actually even go on chain anyway. I think that's okay. And beyond that, you can have people who are actual users who are putting money into lightning, they can have real self custody channels. I think you can pick up that long tail of casual users and kind of take them out of the equation. and going back to your original question of liquidity with LSPs, the other bit here is, you know People are using Lightning significantly more than they were in twenty twenty-three. so instead of having this model of everyone's just putting their money into channels and holding it, which they shouldn't be doing anyway, if you have this model of, hey, people are actually spending and they're moving money back and forth, the numbers look a million times better." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:10", "start": 909.53, "text": "Interesting. Yeah, that's a totally fair point. I think we should distinguish between the uses, right? Like, use the right tool for the job, right? Like, if you are a hodler And you are, you know, putting your coins in your hardware wallet and you're not planning to touch them for five years, ten years, then you don't need those, that money on Lightning. Don't use a Lightning wallet for that purpose, right? Like have different setups, right? Like you should have your cold storage different to what your day-to-day spending is. And I think that's just a very obvious thing that maybe you've got like a Lightning wallet on your phone that you, it's day-to-day earning and spending, that kind of thing, and then A hardware wallet for the longer term storage, and that seems pretty obvious to me, but I think what happens is maybe in the overzealous or in that kind of desire to kind of simplify, everything's put into one, and then it's like this single tool must serve all the use cases, and then you end, you end up in these really like unprofitable or clunky Just technically un-infeasible or just unprofitable uses." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "16:14", "start": 974.06, "text": "Exactly, and that's what I've been talking about in that article was, I think one of the issues actually for self custody lightning in the past couple years is we went in, and this isn't-- I don't think anyone's to blame for this, I don't think this was a stupid thing to do, but everyone had that ultimate vision of, \"We're all gonna be on lightning, everything's gonna be in lightning.\" Right. And that didn't really work, honestly. I think people- If you had, you know, twenty, thirty million of your own Sats in Lightning, you probably weren't having a good time. but we have tools now that make moving from Lightning to on-chain and on-chain to Lightning a lot easier. and one of the biggest ones was, Swap and Potentium, which, we open sourced out of Block. Jesse Posner and Z Man both worked on a couple years ago, and, Phoenix picked it up first, but I think even Phoenix is maybe a little, I think they could do More, and that's what I was writing about in the SaaS build post. So Swap and Potentium lets you basically take on-chain Bitcoin and co-sign it with your LSP so that, say, in a case where you're doing a DCA, you're buying Bitcoin every day, and you probably wanna keep most of it on chain, you can put most of your Bitcoin on chain, but with some special spending conditions with the LSP, you'll be able to- To move that into Lightning instantly. So if you wanna spend on-chain Bitcoin, you don't have to wait for a swap or something like that, since the LSP knows that, that Bitcoin isn't going anywhere without the LSP signing, we can take Bitcoin and basically make it warm. So it eventually will be cold, but instead of keeping it in a Lightning channel and having this big Lightning channel that you're not using, you're able to call that Bitcoin into Lightning really easily." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "18:06", "start": 1085.84, "text": "The lead sponsor of this show is Bold, the best place to buy, sell, and save Bitcoin. For listeners in the US, Bold lets you secure your financial future with complete peace of mind by integrating a low fee Bitcoin only brokerage with next gen multisig vaults. With Bold, you can smash buy Bitcoin or set a DCA plan for only zero point nine nine percent fees and seamlessly deposit the Bitcoin direct to your Bold Vault. The Bold Vault is a two or three collaborative multisig where you hold two keys and Bold holds one as a Redundant backup, protecting against loss or theft. You can use Trezor, Ledger or cold card hardware wallets to spin up a Bold Vault in just a few minutes, and the Bold Vault is the only collaborative custody vault available with zero monthly fees. They're also offering zero fees on your first ten thousand dollars of Bitcoin buys and twenty five dollars of free Bitcoin when you buy a hundred dollars of Bitcoin or more. Try Bold today and upgrade your stacking experience over at getbold dot io. And now, back to the show. Interesting, yeah, as you said, so some of these ideas like Posted channels, swap in Potentium can be used to make it more efficient, right? Like just get rid of the inefficient uses of the chain and do it in an efficient way, obviously saving money on the LSP side, and because obviously it's a competitive market, you can use different LSPs and different wallets That brings the fees down for the end user too, right? Because they can't just charge, you know, sky high rates. There's, there's competitors to contend with. now In the case of things like, as you said, hosted channels, to minimize the amount of times that you have to go on chain, right? Because, you know, maybe it's a dollar or two dollars at today's prices, but in the future it might be a lot more to go on chain, especially if it, if there's a fee spike on, in the fees. And so How would you compare that with the approach that other people have been talking about, like this kind of graduated wallet approach of, okay, start with eCash and then graduate up into maybe Liquid or graduate up then into a Lightning channel, or let's say the Aqua wallet approach where they do, you kind of, you hold your balance in Liquid Bitcoin and it's all in the background doing swaps? How would you compare the hosted channel approach with that, or do you see them as compatible or competing models? How are you seeing that?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "20:28", "start": 1228.34, "text": "They're really similar models, but what I see with eCash and Liquid now is, yeah, things get really cheap and really easy when you use a custodian. I think everyone knows that, that's like a very simple thing. the issue I see is, people saying, \"Use eCash, use Liquid for, just...\" These little tiny spending amounts and don't take a lot of risk, but in reality, the applications that are being made are all liquid, all eCash, all custodian. So in that case, you know, if I'm gonna use a custodian, I'm gonna use Cash App, 'cause, I know the people at Cash App, I know how they're, how they're running things, I know that money isn't going anywhere. but I think there is kind of a fundamental mistake in, you know, if we're saying we need custodian for a small amount Using it for the whole thing. The benefit of hosted channels is that you're starting with the Lightning wallet, you're starting with the Lightning client, and to upgrade to self custody, we just broadcast a transaction. It can happen in the back end, it can be very, simple and quick, and the experience stays the same. So there's no switching, there's no sending things out, stuff like that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "21:41", "start": 1301.32, "text": "Interesting. Okay. So, y- the way you see it is it's like, it's a different UX? To be, to, to do the hosted channel style as opposed to the LBTC wallet style or the eCash style. Now, in fairness though, I think the, maybe, maybe it's a bit of a preference thing or 'cause the way I, I hear the other people talk about it is like it's like a graduated approach, that you would start on these things and automatically once you get above a certain threshold, then you switch over, and I guess the other thing I'm thinking of is people throw around these Numbers, right, of how many people can actually go on chain today. And the ballpark number I've heard, I mean, you tell me if you, if you have a different number in mind, but the ballpark number I hear is ten to one hundred million people, right? That's how many people, even with Lightning today, with the technical constraints of Bitcoin today, that's about how many people can use the chain. so does the hosted channel model still run into that threshold or that, you know, that block of ten to one hundred million?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "22:46", "start": 1365.82, "text": "I don't think so. I mean, also, I love this topic because I've heard so many answers on it. I think, this all started with Paul Schwartz. I call it the, the Paul Schwartz, mind virus, and he says sixty million to one billion, he's got calculations cross at. I just want to, oh, up next, You know, a few months ago, with, Tad Strajda said, \"One billion people can be on chain,\" and Peter Todd recently said, \"One billion lightning channel opens per year and half a billion splices.\" So the numbers are all over the place. Yeah. And I think, you know, honestly, River estimates ten to thirty million self custody wallets or self custody users on Bitcoin right now. I think if we added another hundred million or another billion, I would be over the moon. I don't think, I guess put it this way, I don't see any application right now out there, no wallet, no like cool thing to do with Bitcoin that is going to get us a billion more people on Bitcoin. I just don't see it. Yeah. And I think that's probably the most important thing to work on." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:54", "start": 1433.95, "text": "So in other words, we've got a lot of headroom right now. We've just got a lot of, you know, we're, we're nowhere near that real limit for now," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:04", "start": 1443.52, "text": "and I, I One point I see some of the more developer-focused or build-or kind of people is they're kind of always focused on these limits when we haven't hit anywhere near those limits yet And also sometimes the hurdle is, the bottleneck isn't a technical one, it's like an economic or a social one, that, you know, the culture, people don't wanna, so as an example, there's a lot of people onboarding via ETFs or buying Bitcoin treasury companies as opposed to buying and withdrawing to their own wallet. So, you know, that, that's one aspect. Now of course, in fairness, hey, some people are new, they have to start somewhere, fine, but the hope is that they- eventually graduate up and eventually figure out, oh yeah, okay, I hold some Bitcoin equities or public miners or ETFs, but actually I should also hold some myself Yeah." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "25:00", "start": 1500.13, "text": "Stefan, it's not even economic and social. I'm talking, you know, when you talk about the Bitcoin scaling limits, you're so low on the tech stack. I'm talking even like one or two levels up where we're making the application. things like hosted channels and swap and Potentium are such technical terms, but the point of it is to make a UX that is, it should be wallet Satoshi. We need to bring wallet Satoshi back, but we need to make it self-custodial because that took off like crazy. And I think we can do that again using this kind of tech, and I don't think we should be worrying so much about what op code we wanna put on, 'cause in reality, thinking about op code, thinking about theoretical scaling limits, that's almost an easier problem to solve in your head than the one that's in reality of, you know, I can't use Phoenix in the US right now. Like, what self-custodial Lightning wallet am I gonna recommend to someone to even use in the first place?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "25:56", "start": 1555.95, "text": "Yeah, as I- It, I don't even, Zeus, I guess. What else is there in terms of like one app that just uses that you can just do lightning self custody with? Is that the only one or are there others?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "26:09", "start": 1568.94, "text": "I think it's Zeus. I self-host Mutiny right now, and that is, you know, that's not like, Mutiny" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:14", "start": 1574.14, "text": "isn't, isn't that like defunct or no longer gonna be updated, no longer being" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "26:19", "start": 1578.53, "text": "maintained? You know, I'd, I'd be wary with that, right?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:21", "start": 1581.39, "text": "Because then now you don't have like updated lightning node," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:28", "start": 1588.35, "text": "I, I" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "26:29", "start": 1588.63, "text": "love Zeus, I love what Evan's doing, I'm glad he's still charging forward, but, you know, there's just having that very simple UX, we were getting so close in twenty twenty-four and then we had to rip a bunch of players out of the ecosystem basically." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:42", "start": 1602.39, "text": "Yeah, that's really unfortunate. And so, I guess the, let me put it this way. We've, we've spoken a little bit about kind of the global level, we've spoken a little bit about at a business, I mean, we can get further into that, but what I, what I think would be interesting to ask you is, at the individual end user level What are the actual costs of using Lightning natively, right? Like how many times, you know, is that person gonna have to hit the chain? Now, to be fair, and to be fair to you, this is a little bit of a how long is a piece of string question, 'cause it depends how you use Lightning, how often you are earning and spending, but if you could spell out for people, you know, roughly speaking What kind of cost is the self-custodial Lightning user today gonna be paying, and is that-- do you think in your mind, will that be a hindrance to them because they could just go, quote unquote, just go use a custodial wallet?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "27:46", "start": 1665.51, "text": "It's an interesting question. I think it's a right question to ask. I think it's also important to think about what people can use now. Like, you can get a bank account, if you only keep ten dollars in it, eventually they're gonna cha-charge you ten dollars a month to use that bank account. and if you're using a credit card or something like that, you don't pay the credit card fees directly, but merchants are paying two, three percent to take those transactions. So, you know, this idea of, you know- Using your money is free isn't exactly true right now, and using Bitcoin isn't free. If you wanna send a Bitcoin transaction, you have to pay a transaction fee, and we've seen that go from forty cents to forty dollars in twenty twenty-three and twenty twenty-four, so it's gonna cost money to use Lightning. I think what people aren't really doing is comparing to, you know, what people actually pay. like for instance, on Cash App, when you withdraw from Cash App, you can use Lightning, which is free, but you can also use on chain, and, you know, the limits for on chain are a lot bigger. And Cash App does a really interesting thing, when you're withdrawing onto Bitcoin, you have three options, like priority and a little slower and free. And, A lot of people choose priority. They choose a fee that is much, much higher than, the actual on-chain fee for Bitcoin. And I think to go back to Bitcoiners who are hyper-focused on things costing one cent, but then to look at real-world users who are actually like, \"Five bucks to send a Bitcoin transaction, let's go.\" I think there's a lot of variation there. So when you're talking about Lightning, yeah, you're gonna have to eventually pay for an on-chain fee. If you're running a node that has a lot of traffic going across it, that isn't even from your users, you actually have a lot of fees to play with, and if you have users that you think might be sending transactions back and forth quite a bit, it might make sense to subsidize some of those channel opens. So I think it could vary. There's gonna be a cost to use Lightning, to use Phoenix, I think it's like," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:03", "start": 1803.08, "text": "half percent or something like that. I think it's zero point four percent, something like that. But that's the- That's the sending fee, and I think also for the swap in. So I think if you take an on-chain payment and swap in, I can't remember, but I think it's one percent, you know, you keep going, I'll look it up just to get that number. Yeah," }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "30:19", "start": 1819.45, "text": "and, you know, bolts cost money, all these things are gonna cost money. I think the Lightning torture case is a little overblown, though. I think people who are stacking enough Bitcoin to be sending on-chain transactions gladly pay them, and I think People who are using Lightning, regularly will get a much more efficient, fee story. the issue is when you take people who are DCAing Bitcoin, and they probably should be eventually stacking on chain, and you have them throwing that money into Lightning channels that they're not gonna use, that's when they're starting to pay a lot of on-chain fees, when in reality it probably should be going to, towards something more like Swap and Potentium, where, hey, it's going on chain, you're paying the on-chain fee anyway, but you have UTXOs, and if you ever need to send, if you ever need to buy a car with Lightning, you can, you know, depending on your But with something like Potentium and tools like that, you can change the story a lot. So, it's gonna cost money, but also I think that a lot of people are using the Bitcoin, they're paying Bitcoin transaction fees every day right now, and they're totally happy doing it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:38", "start": 1898.0, "text": "Yeah. I will just confirm, just for listeners, I've looked it up on Phoenix, the receiving via Lightning with insufficient liquidity or requesting liquidity is one percent plus whatever the mining fee is. So, you know, if you- Let's say you take a thousand dollar payment and you don't already have the inbound liquidity, that's ten bucks on a thousand dollars. So, so you would pay that ten dollar fee to have, you know, the inbound liquidity, and then when you're sending out, it's point four percent, so on a thousand dollars, that's four dollars, right? So if you're, if you're paying a thousand dollars, it's four dollars fee, as an example, or plus four sats, but anyway, I guess the point is That's kind of roughly the fees today for an end user who's just kind of e-earning and spending on Lightning. but if you are running your own node Then I guess you can sort of manually manage some of the channels and do things in a slightly different way. Maybe you have your, you've got some other inbound liquidity, or maybe you've opened your own channel to somebody else and you've paid, so now you've got inbound just from that. So I guess it's a different story if you actually manually run your own Lightning node and manage your own channels. Maybe in that case your sending fee is a little cheaper than zero point four percent as well, right?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "32:56", "start": 1976.02, "text": "And that's what you're paying Phoenix for. Phoenix is doing all that for you and giving you a pretty easy to use app. So, yeah, I think it's reasonable. If you wanna get the super cheap lightning fees, you can open your own channels and do it that way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:11", "start": 1990.89, "text": "But I think the other broader point that you touched on, which is a good point, that there's a, let's say, a disconnect between online discussions, whether they are on X or other forums elsewhere, about Bitcoin, because sometimes people will sort of lament the things or talk about things that aren't a concern for normal real world users. So what, what things do you see that are like that? Like, what misconceptions do you see in terms of social media complaints or ideas people have about Lightning that don't actually align with \"Quote unquote real world, real world users.\"" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "33:53", "start": 2033.11, "text": "I think the fee story is a perfect example. I mean, and your example of, \"Hey, if you wanna receive a thousand dollars on Lightning, you have to pay one percent to Phoenix.\" The most people are receiving a thousand dollars on Lightning are merchants, and they're paying three plus percent to do that. So that's a screaming deal for them, actually. and if you're a user and you're receiving a thousand dollars on Lightning and you're just holding it, like you probably should just be receiving that on chain anyway, with an option to move it onto Lightning. So I think fees are pretty big. Other things that don't affect real world people. I think the biggest thing for us in the Bitcoin community is We don't have a lot of, I think Wallet Satoshi was probably the closest wallet that touched the most, real world people, and then, you know, things like Cash App, Coinbase, those are places where you can actually get those insights. And I think as a community, we need to be driving towards those applications that get normal people using it so we can find out real problems. That's what I credit, Mutiny a lot for actually being so early to, you know, the mobile Web-based Lightning game, they found a lot of issues that, you know, Spiral and the LDK team went and fixed. And I think that's the most valuable thing. I feel like we spend a lot of time in theory world of, what if we had a billion users, what would we do then? And I'm just sitting here like, how, how are we getting a billion users? That's, that's not happening right now. So, you know, the more we can get to real people, the better." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:27", "start": 2126.55, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by Creators of the best Bitcoin hardware security devices such as the Coldcard Mark IV and the new Coldcard Q. Now, we use Bitcoin hardware security devices to keep our keys offline, our private keys offline. Now, the way these work is you can do that setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on the, the seed word cards, and keep that secure. Now, you can use this device to interact with the Bitcoin network using software such as Sparrow Wallet, Electrum, or Bep20 Desktop. Or Nunchuk as a few examples. Now, you have a range of security features that you can use with these devices, such as passphrases, you can use seed x or, or my favorite is multi-signature. Now, if you're starting in a basic way, just start with the device and the USB-C cable, plug it directly to the computer and use it that way, and then later improve your setup. But I believe these devices are great at helping secure your coins, especially as you start to migrate up into multi-signature security. But Don't be disheartened or don't be, scared away. They are accessible, and I think you actually do learn about Bitcoin in the process. So to get yours, go to coinkite dot com, use code Livera to get a discount on your cold card. This episode brought to you by Galloy. They are building banking software for the Bitcoin age. So if you are with a bank, a fintech, or a startup looking to offer some kind of Bitcoin product, whether that is a Bitcoin collateralized loan, deposit accounts, or payments, Galloy can help you. Their latest called Lana. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans, Bitcoin collateralized lending product for your customers. Now, Galloy have a lot of experience in the space. They started with Blink Wallet in twenty twenty, and they've since grown this to become a community favorite over time, and so they have a lot of experience making things work in a secure, reliable, and scalable way. So if you need assistance coming to market quickly with a Bitcoin banking product such as lending or deposits or payments, talk to the team at Galloy. You can email them, the email is biz at galloy dot io, or go to the website galloy dot io. And now back to the show. Okay, so it's a fair point you make about, okay, real world users are willing to pay more than, let's say, a few, loud people on X who are whining about paying any fee whatsoever. But Also, is there a comparative fee thing where maybe, you know, going self-custodial with Lightning, maybe you're still paying more than if you're using, let's say, the, the Aqua wallets of the world or the kind of the eCash kind of wallets of the world? do you see that as being You know, like people will just sort of naturally tend towards those things where, you know, using the custodial side chain like Liquid or using custodial eCash is just gonna be an incentive problem there, just that will always be there, that some people will just sort of look at the fee or be very fee sensitive, or do you think- Like that's kind of, again, coming back to the real world users versus like online people." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "38:42", "start": 2321.97, "text": "I'm not so sure about that. you know, I think that obviously you can go a lot cheaper with custodians. Something like eCash or Liquid, the issue there really is how stable or maybe liquid of a custodian do you have that's backing that? And with self custody, what you're really, getting is a really solid assurance that you hold that Bitcoin, you can use it however you want, you don't have any sort of restrictions because it's yours. whereas when you trust someone who's running eCash, c- Ecash mint or you trust Liquid, you are-- you don't really know who's on the other end. I think that's a fundamental problem with eCash or even Liquid, is that, it works really well, like for me and I think Fetty talked about this a lot, if it was me and like my dad and my sister, I would run a mint and I'd be like, \"Hey, here you go,\" although I don't know why I'd really bother with a mint, I'd probably just run a, run a node and, maybe do a hosted channel thing Like that. once it gets bigger than that, you introduce trust, and once you're a really trustworthy mint or federation and people put millions of dollars in, all of a sudden you're a really big custodian that's not doing KYC and looking a lot like a bank. so you kind of have, if you're really small, you're okay, but you're not really providing a lot of value to a lot of people. And once you get really big, you become a target, you become wallet of Satoshi, and I think not paying a lot- Lot in fees is great, but if your money disappears one day or, you know, you have to withdraw because you have to pull out of the US or something, that, that's not so good. So, you know, what will people prefer in the long run? I think they'll prefer apps that are really easy to use and that stick around. And I think the sticking around part might be hard for these kind of, shadow custodians." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "40:46", "start": 2445.66, "text": "Interesting. Yeah, and that's a fair point. Like it takes time to build up a brand Brand name, a network effect, you know, people know, let's say, wallet of Satoshi, or they know certain entities, right? Like a cash app or a Coinbase or whatever, and that's why, you know, people, there's name recognition there, and there's a brand name there, so it takes time for that. And, you know, as you point out, like once you build up that brand, well, then now, now you're, now you might be a target. so, yeah, that's another thing. also wanted to get your thoughts" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "41:20", "start": 2479.68, "text": "Also been a big topic of discussion. Some people in, you know, online Bitcoin circles see this as, \"Oh, they're a big problem,\" other people see them more like, \"Well,\" They're like a stepping stone to Bitcoin, as an example, I think Paulo at, the Plan B forum in El Salvador, I think he said they have about four hundred million Tether users now, globally. And so I guess that's, that may be one argument around kind of, is it a stepping stone for other people? I think, I mean, the way I see it is like I see it like if you already have access to a USD bank accounts, people like you and I who are, let's say, Westerners, then it's hard for us to sort of criticize somebody who is really wanting dollar, you know, crypto fiat basically. So, that's how I'm seeing it. there is also the surveillance angle, so I see it like, well, fiat banks already have a ton of surveillance also, they're doing all this transaction monitoring and screening and all this stuff in the background, whether you know it or not or not, and I see them as sort of comparable, but other people have different arguments on them. So where do you stand on stablecoins? Do you see them as being a valuable thing? Should they be supported, or should they be tolerated, or should they be rejected by the community?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "42:40", "start": 2559.9, "text": "I think stablecoins are really interesting. I have a lot of thoughts on them, honestly. But I think to keep it to the themes we were talking about before, like what do real people want? Real people want dollars. They want the, the green stuff that they can hold in their hands, and that's not really what stablecoins are. I think when you look at stablecoin usage, you can see that stablecoins are really popular in countries where people aren't allowed to have dollars. so that is kind of a interesting situation when you- You have stablecoins controlled by one entity that is basically controlling who can use a stablecoin, and you also see them used for the DeFi, crypto schemes out there. so when people talk about stablecoins being for payments, I'm not so sure that that's what they're used for, 'cause when I think of someone who wants to receive a payment, and they want dollars, I think they want dollars. And this meme of like, \"Well, people will get on...\" Stablecoins, and then they'll get familiar with blockchains, and then they will move to Bitcoin. I just don't think it's really real because you have so many hindrances with, stablecoins already, like the bridging and Ethereum, and if there's no like easy to use stablecoin wallet right now, so it's hard for me to believe that, People who aren't either, you know, it's illegal for them to get dollars or they're already deep into some crypto trading scheme. It's hard for me to believe that regular people are going to be using them so much. ultimately, I think stablecoins have the same sort of UX hurdles that Bitcoin has to overcome, and, although they're taken up a lot in these kind of schemes and, you know, dodging capital controls, I think Bitcoin has better property These overall, and, you know, in the end, yeah, I'm not too worried about stable coins. I think Bitcoin's gonna prevail." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:41", "start": 2680.56, "text": "Yeah, I mean, for me, it's not that I'm worried about them, it's more that I just see there's a use for them in the sense that it's very frictionless for now, at least, for the end users. Of course, there is KYC at the kind of the points when, if you are redeeming stable coins or you're, you're a high net worth or a big, you know, company or something Just wants to kind of use these, these wallets and things. I, I think it's hard for us to-- I mean, I think I would say this is a similar thing where there's kind of an online, let's say, those of us who are ideologically, quote unquote, \"maxi\" versus, the real world people, there are a lot of people out there who actually want these things. Now, of course, as you said, they might want dollars, but maybe dollars aren't what they can actually easily use, and so I can see a, a case People, you know, using this stuff. I, so I guess I'm a little more on the-- I'm not against them, I sort of see a use for them, for people who-- I mean, for me, the way, if, if it was like for me, if I need-- if, as an example, if I needed to, if someone was like, \"Uh, we can't do...\" Bitcoin payment, but we can do a stablecoin payment. I would, in my case, I would just accept the stablecoin payment and instantly flip it to Bitcoin, right? Like that's how I would do it, and so- I, I see, you know, I, I think that's-- Well, I'm curious, what do you think? Any reactions on that? Do you think that's, you know, illegitimate or, you know, bad somehow?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "46:17", "start": 2777.1, "text": "Honestly, I just don't see people using stable coins for payments. I think, you know, it, it is really useful for, again, like you're in a country that, where you're not allowed to hold dollars and your currency's really bad and you want to hold dollars. It's useful for that. Yeah. But when you say people aren't using" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:33", "start": 2793.03, "text": "it for payments, do you mean Americans or do you mean people around the world? Because I mean, clearly there's all people around the world, yeah. I" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "46:39", "start": 2799.05, "text": "think Americans, I think it's just hard to kind of use them right" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "46:47", "start": 2806.84, "text": "They have uses for it, like I think Americans use it for crypto DeFi stuff. I think that, like trading and leverage things. Yeah. So you see, you see them as more like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:55", "start": 2814.54, "text": "a, a trading and leverage thing as opposed to a payments for things." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "47:00", "start": 2819.7, "text": "Yeah, 'cause people, you have to kind of jump through hoops to actually use them, right? And, I think the other thing is in the US, you know, stablecoins are out of the US, it's US dollars in there. I don't know if you heard, the first sub Right. I caught a few," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:18", "start": 2837.74, "text": "a little bit on X about this, so do you wanna elaborate on that?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "47:22", "start": 2841.8, "text": "Yeah, I mean, the big thing there is, what they're talking about in there is, hey, we need KYC, we need AML on stable coins, this is really important. Where the biggest stable coin in the world, Tether, has avoided every US nexus to, to not be subject to that. And that's where stable coins are hitting their sweet spot, is where you don't need that sort of compliance. Whether it's, you know, you're not allowed to use it in your country or you're using it for crazy DeFi things. So the minute we get regulation that says, \"Hey, stablecoins are okay, but you have to do all this KYC/AML,\" I just don't think they're really useful for even their first use case then." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:08", "start": 2887.6, "text": "Yeah, I think it's, yeah, to some extent it's been like a bit of a regulatory arbitrage, right? Like that's kind of what a lot of people have used them for, i-i-in terms of just being slick, but You know, I think it is fair to say that they are-- think of it this way. If you compare to doing a standard fiat wire, right? If you-- probably most listeners and you, I'm sure, have done some kind of international fiat wire, right? What are the details they ask you? Okay, give us the Swift code, give us the beneficial owner's name, what's the beneficial owner's address, what is the purpose for this transfer? Is it an-- do you have an invoice for that? And, et cetera, et cetera. And then you fill out The online form or in the app or whatever, and then if you get even one detail wrong, it comes back a few days later, \"Oh, sorry, the transfer didn't work,\" blah, blah, blah, blah. Now Compare that to stablecoin UX, right? It's like typical crypto scanner, QR code, type in the amount, or it's already embedded into the QR code, and you pay it. So I think there is a payment use for it. I'm, of course, to be clear, I would always use Bitcoin first preference. I would always earn and spend in Bitcoin if that's available. But I see there are- Of people who are maybe using it in, in terms of avoiding having to do standard fiat wire. And that is a very painful process, don't you agree?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "49:38", "start": 2978.26, "text": "Yeah, wires are painful. I do think there is a lot of fragmentation in the crypto ecosystem around, like, is it Tether on Base or is it Tether on, you know, Tron? And, you know, there's a lot of options for sending stablecoins when you go into one of those wallets. It's like, are you picking the right network? Is it going to the right pla- So, I, I don't know how frictionless it actually is, it probably is better than international wire, so I'll, I'll give you that." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:05", "start": 3004.94, "text": "Yeah. So, I mean, that's kind of one thing, and then of course, that's, you know, you've got stablecoins, and then you have other means of doing a similar thing, right? Splink has stable Sats, there's that guy Tony, Clausen who has, stable channels, right? So there are other ways to try and do a similar thing, but for whatever reason, I think stable coins They seem to have-- it's hard to deny the mar-- the product market fit, that there, there is a use there, and I think it would be, it would be a bit, let's say, pigheaded of us to deny that. Yeah, it definitely," }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "50:41", "start": 3040.89, "text": "they're, they're taking off, they're big, right? And then" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:44", "start": 3043.56, "text": "I guess obviously bringing it back to Lightning, there's Taproot assets now, right? So that's, you know, that was another big thing that Tether have come out on Taproot assets, and of course, there are other approaches like even, RGB, so maybe that will, it'll also come to RGB also, but I'm curious your reactions on, you know, Tether being on Taproot assets and being on Lightning. What does that mean for the Lightning network? What does that mean for Bitcoin from your perspective?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "51:13", "start": 3072.54, "text": "It's interesting, you know, I saw some people talking about how the Universe's concept of Taproot assets would make it so that it's more difficult, for, Tether to revoke people's, stablecoins. Yeah. my understanding there is" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:31", "start": 3091.23, "text": "they are able to disavow, so it's kind of like- It would become like marked, you know, if, let's say, it was hacker, wh-whatever, bybit hacked, you know, s-scenario or whatever, t-Tether would have the ability to centrally sort of disavow from here onwards. So that's my understanding of it." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "51:53", "start": 3113.08, "text": "Oh, okay. Yeah, I haven't gone too deep on it. but yeah, I, I think it's fine. I wonder how much better Lightning is than Tron, honestly. If we're, you know, in this paradigm of you have to pay the cheapest, amount of money for, for a transaction, ultimately, I feel like I'm kind of neutral on it. And yeah, what I worry about honestly is, I think a lot of people have talked about this, if stable coins become a very regulated thing. I think the dream for stable coins on Lightning is you just have a node and you're offering stable coin exchange and it kind of proliferates. It's the same dream with eCash and all these other kind of custodian things, but, I'm not sure that can be the reality." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "52:43", "start": 3163.13, "text": "Yeah. So, yeah, I guess the- Like, I guess the idea is, will there be users who want stablecoins but they're not ready yet for, for Bitcoin? And how many people are in that camp? Or how many people are legitimately gonna be like that, that they don't just want-- they're, they're not willing to go to Bitcoin right now, or they're not willing to take, you know, to kind of ride the volatility of Bitcoin? Or, yeah, so I guess that's kind of the question, and some people have raised this kind of concern of like fork choice, right? Like, would that give Tether kind of power over which is the correct chain in a regulation compliant scenario, if there were to be a contentious fork? I, I personally think it's a low risk. I think, you know, Bitcoin itself is decentralized and You know, the, the nodes and, you know, the Bitcoin, the, the developers, the nodes and the miners of Bitcoin, you know, will still remain decentralized, That, you know, it's not just gonna be like the government can backdoor control Bitcoin through controlling the stablecoin. that's how I'm seeing it, but I'm curious if you have any thought there." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "53:59", "start": 3239.05, "text": "Yeah, I'm, I'm cur-- I just don't know how many stablecoin users actually move over to Lightning just because, you know, it's, yeah, people are getting along fine on Tron, it seems, I'm not sure. But, you know, talk-- speaking of users who don't want the volatility of Bitcoin, I think a big thing that could hit those users that doesn't really need stable coins and gets the same effect is if you were able to just spend from your dollar balance in cash app over Lightning. I think that would be a really easy way actually to make payments happen that are still fiat-denominated, but that don't give people the exposure of Bitcoin. You get the benefits of the low transaction fees and the universality of Bitcoin without having to do a stablecoin. So I wonder if the future might more be-- Are you talking" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:51", "start": 3291.38, "text": "there about internal like cash app to cash app, or you mean like cash app to an external person?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "54:56", "start": 3296.15, "text": "Oh, just imagine you scan a Lightning invoice. Cash App and you don't have a Bitcoin balance, and they just pay for it anyway. They do the conversion on the fly. that's basically what stablecoins on Lightning are, you know? It's, you get stablecoins and they're on the Bitcoin blockchain, but when you're actually sending them, you're converting to Bitcoin, and Bitcoin's going across the Lightning network, and you get stablecoins at the other end if you want to. So why not just do it with fiat? Then people have dollars, if they wanna have dollars, they're real dollars that they can take out" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "55:29", "start": 3329.27, "text": "I mean, essentially you would just need to give banks and like financial institutions the ability to send Bitcoin." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:36", "start": 3336.46, "text": "Yeah. But I think in practice-- Well, I think in practice, given kind of what's happening in the US environment now, I'm not American, I don't live in America, but- It seems like the big banks in America might wanna get into the stablecoin game themselves, so they might launch their own coin. You might have BOA stablecoin and, I don't know, whatever other big banks' stablecoins and, and Then I guess w-we'll see what, what exactly is that gonna look like UX-wise and kind of experience-wise and what does it actually mean? But, I guess that's a bit of an open question, right? Do you have any thoughts on where that goes or no?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "56:16", "start": 3376.28, "text": "Sounds like a big mess to me, Stefan. Van, I agree with, I agree with you," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "56:20", "start": 3380.34, "text": "I agree with you, but maybe, maybe they're gonna have to do some kind of swapping in the background of like, let's say Alright, let's say I was an American and I had BOA and I send you BOA coin and you're on, I don't know, Chase Bank, and you got Chase dollar coin, and are they gonna do some swap thing in the background? I don't know. It's, I don't really know how that would work, but, maybe, maybe that's what they're doing, maybe that is what it, what it is gonna be. So" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "56:45", "start": 3405.45, "text": "It's probably better for the dollar to be more digital and more, digital native, but what's interesting to me is giving people the ability to truly hold their value and send it anywhere, and I think if we get the UX right, that is, that can be by default a better experience." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "57:06", "start": 3426.5, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, interesting. And, as I think at the end of the day, like, I think it's all coming back to Bitcoin, right? Like, I think some of these dollar stable coins may help the dollar dominance versus weaker fiat currencies, but of course, I think those of us in the Bitcoin world, we sort of see it like, you know, the Bitcoin monetary maximalist view is, hey, it's all coming to Bitcoin, so obviously we wanna, we wanna front run that and just get straight into Bitcoin. Of course, not everybody else right now, today, in twenty Believes us or is, you know, is on board with that vision. I think it will take time to grow these network effects, right? Even with like this kind of, Taproot assets, right? It'll, it'll take time to grow that network effect. so it, it's just, I think so, it'll just take time, with all these things. of course, the idea is to sort of piggyback existing networks, right? The Lightning Network is one example. but ultimately, yeah, it comes back to how do, how" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "58:06", "start": 3486.05, "text": "Summing things up, do you have any thoughts on where things should go from a builder perspective, Bitcoin and Lightning?" }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "58:15", "start": 3495.14, "text": "I think we need another wall of Satoshi, and I think it needs to be self-custodial this time. the craziest part of the river report was, the amount of-- the volume going up is great, but the number of transactions going down, generally, you know, is pretty good, but I think it really shows a lot of people were zapping and doing a lot of Of crazy things in twenty twenty-three, and losing these easy to pick up and also easy to integrate, like use APIs with wallets, has really kind of set us back a bit. And that's what I'm really interested in next is, what, what gets us very easily using Lightning natively again. And, yeah, I think it's, something that the ecosystem should be trying to build." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:04", "start": 3544.08, "text": "Yeah, I, I think if I had to summarize, as, as you said, there's a few things, hosted channels, swap in Potentium, and I guess people understanding that they can integrate, right, Lisa? It's not like if you're listening now and you're thinking, \"Oh, wow, I need to like code all this stuff myself,\" no, you don't, right? Like there are providers, there are people who will help you, like, like Breeze SDK, who can help you have like either their nodeless kind of liquid style or the native Breeze" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "59:34", "start": 3573.7, "text": "Out there, I think Voltage and, you know, Lightspark and, you know, many other providers out there who will help you, so I think maybe that's the other thing, right? Like getting adoption in the non-crypto, like in fiat businesses who otherwise have nothing to do with crypto, but just being able to accept Lightning payments, right? It should just be a no-brainer for a lot of people because, hey, you can, you can open it up to how many hundred million people now have access to Lightning. I think there was a Breeze payment report at It's like six hundred million people, six hundred fifty million people who have, now, yes, they're not all using Lightning, but they have access to it. So I think that's probably a key takeaway that, you know, there's, there is opportunity in Bitcoin and Lightning. It is growing despite, what some of the crypto and some of the Lightning haters will say about it, it is growing and, there is this opportunity now. So, I guess that's a good spot to finish it. listeners, check out Nick's work." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:00:33", "start": 3633.8, "text": "looks like the website is sats dot build and of course nick underscore slaney on x dot com. Nick, thanks for joining me today." }, { "speaker": "nick_slaney", "time": "01:00:42", "start": 3642.79, "text": "Thanks, Stefan." } ] }