{ "episodeId": "SLP643", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "niftynei": { "name": "Niftynei", "role": "guest", "tag": "NIFTYNEI" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.17, "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, rejoining me on the show today is Lisa, aka Niftynei. Nifty is the founder of Base58, which is Bitcoin education, both live and also on- Online and also the founder of BTC++, which is, one of the leading, let's say, Bitcoin technical conferences and events, and so we're gonna get into all that today. So first of all, welcome to the show!" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "00:44", "start": 43.54, "text": "Yeah, thanks for having me, Stefan. it's been a while. I feel like last time I was on, I don't even remember what we were talking about. Maybe Lightning things. I think it" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:50", "start": 49.82, "text": "was probably Base 58 as well at that, at that time as well. But maybe give a, give us a quick update. What's your focus nowadays in terms of, you know, give us a split, like how much of your time is on Base 58, how much of your time is on the event Bitcoin Plus Plus side?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "01:04", "start": 64.4, "text": "Yeah, so, I still do a little bit of Lightning stuff occasionally, that's probably like 10% of my time. probably spend even less than that on Base 58 to be honest. I'm trying to change that in the next few months, but it turns out it's really hard to travel and also get things done. and then the majority of my time has really been on running Bitcoin++, which is an international technical conference series for Bitcoiners. we just had our eighth event, and first one in Brazil, eighth event overall. so In two and a half years in five different countries. The last one was in Brazil, and we just wrapped that up like two weeks ago." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:42", "start": 101.61, "text": "Fantastic. Yeah. And I've, and just for listeners, I've had the pleasure of attending. I was at, one of the ones in Austin. I think was it last year, maybe the year before. I had a great time. I thought it was good. there was a lot of, really good, you know, technical people there, and obviously for someone like me, it's good to be able to talk with people and But yeah, it's interesting to see because, conferences take a lot of work, and it sounds like you've really gone all in on doing lots of them, not just kind of one annual event, but actually, what is it, five or six in a year, right? Can you, can you explain why? What's the thinking behind that?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "02:20", "start": 139.55, "text": "Dude, yeah. So last year we did three, this year I'm trying to do six. The reasoning is really like, it really has to do with the geography of, of where Bitcoiners are. So original idea was that I wanted to run Friends in Bitcoin together to talk about what they're working on. Because at the time, I started the conference series in twenty twenty-two, at the time people were talking about, \"Oh, all the good talent is leaving Bitcoin, either it's because of lawsuits or it's boring or, you know, a lot of people in Ethereum like to kind of push on Bitcoin being like, \"Oh, nothing interesting ever happens in Bitcoin from a technological standpoint.\" And for people who are in the middle of it, like, you know, that's not true, right? Like, you know, there's lots of interesting Like content or like a venue really to showcase all the interesting things. Like people that are really good at working on technical stuff often tend to be the worst in terms of talking about what they're working on. so I started doing, I started the event in Austin. We're gonna have our fourth annual event in Austin this upcoming May. but really soon after that, I was like, I wanna go to Mexico City and do one in Mexico. I don't know why. I don't, I don't really remember why. It was just like, it seems like fun. There's" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "03:34", "start": 214.12, "text": "Community together in Mexico City, and it'll be great. I had a lot of fun with it, and for whatever reason, decided that I needed to be running events in different parts of the world, mostly so that I could convince my friends, my dev friends that lives close by, to come to an event. it's really hard for people who like live in Australia or live in Latin America to fly to Austin to go to an event, for example, or a lot of Bitcoin events. It's like" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:01", "start": 240.58, "text": "visas, the cost, not everyone can easily get an American visa, this kind of thing" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "04:05", "start": 244.8, "text": "Exactly, and it's hard to get people to go to Europe, et cetera. So it's like, okay, what if I run an event in every corner of the world in a year? d-did I need to be doing this? I don't know, but I am. so we just did Brazil, we've done two in Latin America. This will be our third year in Berlin, so we have a European conference every year. We're adding Asia this year, so we're gonna be in Taipei, hopefully in December. So that'll be our first like East Asia" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "04:34", "start": 274.22, "text": "To, you know, the Americas or Europe. so yeah, like, I mean, the real thing is like, okay, Bitcoin is decentralized, it's everywhere. There's technical people working on interesting things in every part of the world. I think it's really good to build community, both by bringing people that, you know, like if you hold an event in a different part of the world, then you can bring your friends from, you know, Asia to the US or from the US to Asia, vice versa. so it's really like, I think in an attempt to Of Bitcoin developers that are working on cool stuff and have a platform for coming together and, having good time hanging out and talking about what they're working on. there's been a lot of really cool things that happened At our events, like the last one in Brazil was focused on hacking. I invited a friend who's working on an open source project in Noster called White Noise to come. I, I might have falsely promised him that I would help hack on it. I ended up being too busy during the event to like take time to contribute, but he ended up finding like a team of like three, four, five people and now has like an entire like group of open source devs that are contributing to the project, and it sounds like he's gonna make some real traction this year now that he Like, open source dev managers and like a solo hacker, and to me that's kind of like what the project, that's like what these events are all about, right? Is how do we get new developers, giving new developers or interested parties a place to come and meet cool, interesting projects in open source Bitcoin that need, that need help or that, you know, maybe give you ideas about ways to get involved, maybe you'll meet a project that turns into your next gig, and it's been like, it's actually been like, really- Really, super successful at doing that, and it's kind of cool to see, and maybe that's why I keep spending time on it, is because the return on time and far, in terms of, you know, really just watching people in the space level up. we actually recorded a couple videos at Brazil of people who were at the event that had been at a previous Bitcoin Plus Plus in Austin or maybe the one in Buenos Aires that we did previously, and just kind of chronicling like their dev journey over the last, even like not even a year, and going from like we- One story of someone who went from being like a backend dev, doing, more internal tooling at a startup, to now just recently getting hired at a hot new Bitcoin startup to work on actually protocol stuff. another dev like went to a Bitcoin Plus Plus, went home, started a bit devs, and then this year came to the bit devs with like three or four of his new local like developer friends that are, working on getting into Bitcoin development. So, yeah, it's been, it's been really cool." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:16", "start": 435.97, "text": "Yeah, let's talk about, the size of the Bitcoin developer community because this is one of those things that's kind of breathtaking when you zoom out and think about it. Bitcoin today is something like one point six trillion, but, you know, just recently it was like a two trillion asset. There are, you know, some of these Fang or Magnificent Seven, sorry, Magnificent Seven companies who, their market cap is in that range, and they would have, you know, how many thousand, tens of thousands of developers? But that number in Bitcoin seems a lot smaller. So do you wanna just touch on what you think the rough, you know, what's the rough order of magnitude we're talking about here and why is that?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "07:56", "start": 475.7, "text": "Yeah, it's tiny. And so, like, I think there's-- Okay, so I think there's some interesting things going on here when you talk about, you know, numbers and trillion dollar assets and that sort of thing. I was talking to, Lucas of Vincium, which is a nonprofit down in Brazil, which is doing a lot of work for getting new devs into Bitcoin. He was saying that they had estimated about two hundred and fifty devs work full time across the entire open source Bitcoin landscape. So it's pretty small, like the number of people that full time work on" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "08:27", "start": 506.8, "text": "The interesting thing though about, like, okay, so, you know, tiny number of people, but he's also at the time was running a boot camp for new devs in Bitcoin, and it probably had like twenty or thirty people there in Sao Paulo, and then that also came to Bitcoin++ to hack. so it's like, okay, there's only two hundred and fifty people working on this full time, but we're getting, like, programs like Lucas's are getting twenty to thirty new people in. Dulce Villarreal, who runs this project called Liberated Satoshi, did a similar project Ended in November in, in Buenos Aires, which I also got to go help with a little bit, and she had a bunch of her students at Bitcoin Plus Plus in Brazil last two weeks ago. one of the interesting-- Okay, so it's like across these two programs that's now like as a workforce, like maybe forty people, new devs that need to get slotted into projects. So It's like, okay, the total number of devs that are working on Bitcoin is quite small. I think a big part of that is, you know, labor force. So we've got these projects, like what Dolez is working on, bringing people in, but then it's also the money to like pay them full time. So even though Bitcoin is like an enormous asset, like, you know, what you're saying, there's like eight, maybe mega corporations that have a market cap as big as Bitcoin, part of it is that like, those are all concentrated into a single institution that's got Flow and point it at employing devs and building out salaries, that sort of thing. Bitcoin is an asset, doesn't really-- well, one, it's decentralized, right? So that like value is like diffused across like Millions more people than I would bet, like the mega corp, like value is concentrated. The other thing is that, like, those corporations have cash flow that they built their businesses on, whereas Bitcoin, the cash flow is like what miners making new blocks every ten minutes, and that is like, again, extremely distributed. So there's not like, there's like a bunch more people that own a lot more of a bigger asset, and it's much harder to find businesses that are like, biz-- Bitcoin businesses that are cash flow positive that are then taking that money. And investing it back into open source Bitcoin. I feel like it's much more common in the Bitcoin space for a lot of these open source projects to be funded by philanthropy. So that would be things like Chaincode, which is a philanthropic org-foundation, a lot of the money that Jack Dorsey has been giving to organizations. there's a couple other really, early Bitcoiners that have quite a bit of capital which they're directing to nonprofits and funding spaces, et cetera. But for the large part, I think like a Bitcoin- Business that is like heavily cash flow positive, like a big cash flowing business in the Bitcoin industry that would have, you know, the, the extra cash basically to keep employing engineers full time, et cetera. I'm not really sure what that would be outside of exchanges, and historically they haven't really been focused on Bitcoin, they've been focused on casino coins." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:19", "start": 679.03, "text": "Yeah, yeah, I think it's a fair answer that, even though the asset size is kind of in the range of two trillion, let's say, the actual revenue, let's say, is going to miners, and that's also going to pools and getting paid out to individual miners. It's not like it's getting paid out to all the users. So consequently, it sort of falls to enough people being ideologically motivated, to sort of do this philanthropy, this kind of, this aspect, or it falls to- Some developers, if they are independently wealthy, like they've already made, maybe they've already made some money in their corporate career, and now they're kind of okay to quote-unquote take a pay cut and work on something Bitcoin related, and so I guess that's, that's been the pattern. But I guess the question to you would be, do you think that pattern will continue or will something change in that? You know, in the next five years or ten years?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "12:10", "start": 730.15, "text": "And it's a great question. I think it's like, okay, so what's gonna change? And I think this is where, like, you know, my longer term plans for like the Bitcoin Education Project, Base fifty-eight, kind of, I think it's like, okay, maybe education can solve this. Maybe we can create a school, like a nonprofit school, that people, like, learning about Bitcoin is valuable enough that people are willing to pay for it. And because they're willing to pay for it, then you create a cash flow" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "12:38", "start": 757.73, "text": "ecosystem and that cash that's flowing into learning about how protocols and engineering and really gaining a good grasp of what's going on underneath, like magic money. Can then fund the ability to keep paying Bitcoiners to continue working on the protocols, et cetera. At least that's one way I've been thinking about like what the potential impact of like a flywheel if Phase 58 actually like ever gets up and running at scale, and we get lots of students in. But, you know, it's kind of interesting watching this like AI learning thing come out though, because a lot of the AI, IA learning, AI learning tools and stuff, I think, really are sort of like trending in almost the opposite direction, where it's like But the AI tools don't pay the people coming up with the knowledge for it, right? So the AI tools like go out and ingest a bunch of information that's freely available across the web, et cetera, and then put that into basically what is a, a very fancy search engine that then, people pay access to this body of knowledge search engine which formulates like, you know, responses to you in like a text-based way. It's very different than Google, but it's a similar kind of search engine, like Google, you do search and it gives you links to articles people have In, LLMs, you do a search, you know, you do like a text-based search and it produces a, a like an essay for you, but it's still doing a very similar type of work in terms of searching over a search space of data that it's ingested previously, it's just like slightly different in terms of what the output and querying parameters are for that, but that data has to come somewhere, and I think a lot of people really think, \"Well, the AI can just teach me all the stuff.\" A lot of what an AI" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "14:19", "start": 859.26, "text": "So who's still writing those like ten top Google hits and what's the motivation for publishing them if, you're not gonna get the audience, like, people aren't gonna go to your blog post anymore, the LLM's not gonna tell anyone that you were the one who wrote it, I don't know. So I think it's like, I think there's like, I think the next decade of education and like what value teachers and, anyone who's like actually, you know, charging for an education, trying to build a school, I think what that looks like Different, in the next ten years. And so I'm like, maybe that isn't gonna be as much of a cash flow as I would think, you know? Maybe that's really interesting." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "14:58", "start": 898.03, "text": "So let me summarize a little. Now, I'm not a developer, but just as I understand it, historically how the way it might work is a programmer might be searching online to find, you know, Stack Overflow or forums and kind of discussion about, okay, here's a piece of code that I used to do this, and they would then have to sort of read that, understand that, and then" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:19", "start": 918.78, "text": "With the likes of, you know, Claude and, Cursor and things like this, you, you, you're, and people are doing this quote-unquote vibe coding, right? This idea of instead of manually writing it out themselves, they're kind of saying a command to the LLM to say, \"Hey, write me a function that does this,\" or \"Change the, you know, whatever the website to do that,\" and it's then sort of- Going and trying to find, as you said, like these p- these pieces of code around the world, around the web, or let's say, kind of, I, I forgot the word, but it's like ingesting, you know, code that's already been written and then pulling that into-- and then hopefully it works, but I mean, yeah, but the-- but I guess the point you were making is, who's gonna make the new stuff? but I guess it's, it's just gonna be-- But here's one other kind of" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:11", "start": 970.57, "text": "What I'm hearing, and I'm curious to get your reaction as well, is that what we're seeing now with some of this AI coding, Claude, Sonnet, and things like this That it's enabling, let's say, a few developers to do what used to take, you know, a bigger team. And so maybe it's kind of gonna change the game in terms of how many developers you need to start a company. Maybe there'll be lots more smaller companies. I, I don't know. It's obviously it's difficult to predict where all this goes, but I'm curious what you think that would look like." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "16:42", "start": 1001.7, "text": "Well, I mean, so I think it also, I-- so I'm super excited about this like ability for people with an idea to get a first draft and like MVP and prototype out without having to find someone who's talented enough to like make their vision happen, right? in fact, we're doing a hackathon in Austin next week during South by Southwest, which is just two hours long. Or the idea being that you come in and you use like this vibe coding AI stuff to get as far as you possibly can in two hours to produce something interesting built on Bitcoin or that uses Bitcoin, in some way and show it off. So like, yeah, I'm like, and I think Marty Bent, I was on Marty Bent's show a few weeks ago and he said he was gonna come and try to build something. Marty's not a coder, but he's like using these tools to build things that he wants to enable himself to do cool stuff. So I'm like a hundred percent on board" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "17:33", "start": 1052.85, "text": "Building things that you wanna see exist in the world more accessible. Like that's the only reason I really got into coding was because I wanted to build things and see them exist, and so I needed to learn how to write code to do that, and so I did it. but I think like, I think this ability to talk to an AI and learn things or talk to an AI and build things is gonna, I think, really make us reevaluate what we want education as education for, right? If you don't have to like, I mean, you need education maybe in terms- In terms of like, how do I talk to these AI tools? So maybe the things that you're trying to learn through education are going to change. maybe you're not as interested anymore in learning how CSS works because there's tools that make the CSS work for you, that sort of thing. CSS for those who aren't familiar is just a formatting language for displaying things on websites. So if you're building a webpage, you probably need a decent, understanding of it in order to make it look pretty and functional. yeah, but it's like, okay, what is education? Beyond knowledge, that sounds weird, but like, why, why do, why to go to school? Why have professors? Why have teachers? why spend time in institutions learning things if you can just talk to a computer and produce new things, like create a new business without having to like really learn too much about how computers work or, maybe you can learn about the history of ancient Egypt without having to take a class on it, that sort of thing. Like, where does this leave instructors and teachers and- And like schooling in general, with these new tools at your fingertips, and I think you kind of, like, this is where I'm kind of like, maybe this is why I've been spending more time on base, not base fifty-eight, on Bitcoin Plus Plus than on base fifty-eight, because I think that you end up at the place where a lot of what people are gonna want out of a school or like that kind of experience is the interaction with other humans. Right. The in-person," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:25", "start": 1165.42, "text": "yeah. And" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "19:26", "start": 1165.66, "text": "so it's not the information so much as feeling like you have a Have a role, feeling like you have a place in the tooling system where you're able to contribute, having like a better understanding of what's in the space, like all of the like social things that humans are always gonna need, right? Like we're social creatures. So even if you can learn about how all this stuff works just by talking to a computer, you're still gonna want to feel like you're part of a community, and I feel like that's where the Bitcoin Plus Plus like series of events and the reason that I run so many and the reason we do so many all over the" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "20:01", "start": 1201.13, "text": "You know, the dev community of people that really understand how these things work and can talk about what the future of Bitcoin might look like based on what we're able to like imagine together." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:11", "start": 1210.93, "text": "Back to the show in a moment. This show brought to you by CoinKites dot com, the 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 That setup, write down your twelve or twenty-four words on those, 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 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 product is called LANA. It is a loans management platform, and you can use this to come to market quickly and offer a loans or 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. One other reaction could just be It just becomes a new-- it forms a tool that teachers have to use when they're teaching, you know, maybe it's sort of like that. And I'll, I'll give an analogy even from the accounting world, right? One of my, you know, in my fiat life, I studied accounting as one of my majors and- There's the difference between sort of having the bookkeeper, let's say, who is just kind of crunching the receipts and the specific numbers, and then the, let's say, the chartered accountant or the CPA who sort of had to apply Judgment and other aspects of it. And so even though there was accounting software, it was still like, no, well, you still needed to kind of learn the basics of debits and credits and how do, how do these things flow through together into a balance sheet and a, you know, and to an income statement and so on. And the, the analogy in the programming sense would be, look, yeah, you can just vibe code something, but maybe it'll create this kind of spaghetti code, and if there's a bug, now you need to kind of actually understand how to go in there and Advanced to the point in the future, but at least in the short to medium term, it seems like you can't just totally escape learning how to understand what's happening. And so there's still a role for education, i-is how I'm understanding it." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "23:45", "start": 1425.1, "text": "And there's still the process of taking understanding of how these systems work and embedding it in people's minds, right? And like getting that information about, like, this is how the world is structured, and now you have that structure in your head, right? Like that's a whole process that- Maybe a lot, like maybe talking to coding bots or like talking to Claude, et cetera, can help with. but I also think like, you know, some part of education and why we like teachers is like there is entertainment value to some extent of like sitting down and having a teacher explain to you how something interesting works. so I think education, I think teachers that stay in the business are gonna start looking more and more like entertainment, and maybe that already exists kind of on YouTube with like, you know, there's certain YouTube influencers That explain how certain interesting things work in physics, and these are probably like, you know, some of the best educators of our era. And a lot of what they're doing is like some form of entertainment, right? it is entertaining. And I think maybe this is like, maybe this is the key insight, is that learning new things is entertaining, and it's meant to be a form of entertainment, and, the reason that we go to school is to learn because it's empowering and entertaining, and we like the way that, like, the emotional feeling that you get of like learning and is life-changing, and that's why people will continue like pursuing certain forms of education and having teachers that they like want to learn things from, is because they value not just the-- like, they value the experience. It's like an experience, it's experience good, rather than just like something that you necessarily need to get a job, et cetera. I mean, I feel like, you know, like the Stripe brothers, the Collison brothers, who started Stripe, which is one of the biggest payment processing startups, in- In the US, maybe in the world. what they, they got kind of, one of the things that was really interesting is like, so they started Stripe, right? Which is like a pretty basic business, maybe more complicated than that, but you know, like it basically is like a web API for talking to credit card companies. And what they did after they got super rich, or like the thing that they got into next, is like they started hiring private tutors to learn about physics or hiring private tutors to like learn about things that they were really interested in. so maybe that's kind of what the future will look like, is like you don't have to worry about learning because you need it for a job or you need it to like make a fortune or to survive in the world, but learning because you wanna be able to participate in conversations about those topics and because you know that that's like where the- The future of the world is going, and the only way to participate in the future is by understanding what it is that people are talking about. And I guess that's kind of where I'm trying to position like Base fifty-eight or even Bitcoin Plus Plus. Like, one of the taglines we use for Bitcoin Plus Plus is the, the frontier of Bitcoin. and part of it is like you wanna show up and come to these events because you wanna participate in the conversations around where Bitcoin is headed. And that's the part that, like, no AI can tell us, right? That's the part that's like, can-- like the basis, that's kind of based on all these people coming together with smart ideas about what should happen next in Bitcoin, and they get together and they have to talk about it somewhere, and Bitcoin Plus Plus has, I think, traditionally been a pretty good venue for people sharing ideas and what they're working on and what they're hoping will happen now that they've built X, Y, Z tool, that sort of thing, so-" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:10", "start": 1629.59, "text": "Yeah. Okay. Well, let's get into then, some of the topics you" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:15", "start": 1634.9, "text": "Mempools and mining is the next one in Austin, right?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "27:18", "start": 1638.18, "text": "Yeah, so really excited about this one. It's gonna be our first one talking about mempools and mining full stuff. So basically, like, when you make a transaction, how do you get it to a miner? And then when you're a miner, how do you get paid for like these transactions getting included in blocks? so we're gonna have a bunch of really great people. Gloria's coming from Brink, talking to Mike from Brink about bringing in some of their other engineers, which hopefully we" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "27:45", "start": 1664.92, "text": "I could say someone's coming until I've gotten confirmation, but, it should be a really good, hopefully I'm gonna partner with Bitcoin Optech and have like our first kind of series of workshops about some of the new changes that have been shipped in, the Bitcoin like mempool and transaction relay code in Bitcoin Core, so that should be some really interesting discussions. Also inviting as many people that are working on new pool technologies, so Ocean hopefully will be there talking about Dym. We're gonna have We have Bob McElreath from Braidpool, which is a new way of keeping track of shares, as well as Evan, he goes by V R N P C, who's been working on how we can use eCash issuance to keep track of mining shares just to verify that pools are giving you, the fair amount of Bitcoin for the amount of work that you're submitting. So, hopefully it's gonna be a really great, like, meeting of people talking about, what is going on and how you get paid as a miner, as well as how you get trans- Transactions to pools as someone working on protocols. So if you're a miner and you're interested about what kind of new algorithms are coming out, both to make sure that you're getting the money that you're owed, as well as that you can get paid out, maybe at lower, like, lower amounts, I know that's the thing for home miners. or also, and also if you're interested in talking about, like, if you're a layer two designer or you're working on a protocol that requires getting transactions mined, so this might be someone who's building a DLT Like type of protocol or another layer two like Ark, for example, a lot of these like layer two protocols, Lightning included, getting your transactions mined is like one of the most important security features for making sure the protocols continue working. so this would be like a really great event to come and learn about like all the new tools and strategies and algorithms, et cetera, that Bitcoin Core people have been working on to make sure that getting transactions into the mempool or Into blocks in a timely fashion is, possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:49", "start": 1789.08, "text": "Yeah, interesting. And I think it is, also an interesting idea that you have it organized by themes. So it's not as much of a generic, let's say, technical conference. It's, it's sort of more about, okay, this is the topic of the day for, you know, these two days or whatever. so that is interesting. And then, yeah, as you mentioned, the mempool stuff is evolving over time, and I think, From some of my episodes with, like, a, like a Gloria Zaw, where she explains, okay, these are some of the areas where maybe things are, maybe not broken, but sort of, once the system hits a certain level of load, it'll get difficult, and that's where some of these, innovations, and I know, and I know there's also kind of back and forth there as well, because there are other people like, like a Peter Todd, who sort of has a different idea about how it should be done, and, you know, there's, there's, But as an example, mempool, clus-cluster mempool, as I'm understanding, and things like zero fee anchors and these kinds of ideas that would help people You know, operate in this, in this kind of off-chain L2 world, but still being able to, as, as you mentioned, part of the security is being able to get back on chain if you need to because of the, the way the protocols work, right?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "31:11", "start": 1870.87, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I apologize, sounds like they're doing construction upstairs. so hopefully that won't happen too long, but, yeah, yeah, exactly. And there's like a lot of stuff that's changed in the last year and a half, maybe two years, that it's gonna take a lot of work Layer twos, et cetera, to really start and wallets, et cetera, truly start taking advantage of all those changes. And like exactly, it's like, okay, all these changes have like helped with X, Y, Z, what distances are still that we need, to cover to really make that a reality? And then I think another part of like, another big part of like mempool relay stuff that isn't really talked about much is the importance of keeping like block construction decentralized, right? So as we create like new ways of like, so one, it's like improving Giving the ability for anyone who wants to send a transaction to be able to efficiently send that transaction and pay a competitive rate to get that mined, how does that like help or hurt our ability for like small miners to continue building blocks and being rewarded for it in a way that they're not at a disadvantage from more bigger centralized block builders that maybe have more, like, hopefully, you know, really-- And I, I wrote a blog post, a post on this to the mailing list a couple of- years ago about how miner like block construction centralization is probably one of the biggest existential threats to Bitcoin, period. and one of the things is like you wanna preserve the ability for Anyone who's building a block template to get all the transactions and get the most money out of those transactions is like anyone else. and part of the way that we do that is through relay and making sure that being able to relay transactions equivalently across like a common protocol is, is easy to do. The other thing is making sure that when you're building blocks and getting rewarded for them, that it's easier maybe for smaller miners to build their own block templates. Like, so what does that look like? and then And how they get rewarded for it in terms of like, how do you build block templates independently but still contribute to a pool, that kind of thing. So I think like one of the focuses or like sub, sub-themes of this particular event is going to be, how do we ensure that like small miners can continue to stay profitable and competitive, equally, like, equal access to mempool transactions, et cetera." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:39", "start": 2018.78, "text": "right. As opposed to the, the other side of it where it's like private mempools and you need to- To be a big player to even get started or to be, to be reasonably profitable, and I know the, like, the Ocean guys are really focused on this datum idea because that's one way to have transaction selection being done by individual miners as opposed to pushing it to the pool level, which is, where the potential centralization concern could be. Exactly. And the other big one on the mining side I'm hearing is that some of the mine- Is, so this kind of comes to like the whole fee," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:20", "start": 2059.63, "text": "the kind of like, are they doing PPLNS or are they doing like, the FPPS? And so- The kind of arguments that have been, that are going on in the mining world are like, \"Hey, actually people are getting underpaid when they go to FPPS pools, and you're better off using PPLNS or Tides in the ocean case.\" And so there's kind of arguments there about actually- You can get paid out more. Now, yes, it's maybe a little more variable, but in a sense, that's also one of the arguments that like on FPPS, they feel like, \"Okay, I'm getting this steady, stable income,\" but actually it's less verifiable and actually- You're actually paying a, a, a decent amount for that, and other people like Bob Burnett, from, Barefoot Mining have come out with their numbers saying, \"Hey, actually, yeah, I made more, you know, pound for pound, I made more on Ocean,\" and that's what he's trying to prove out to people. So I guess this is gonna also form part of the discussion." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "35:18", "start": 2117.82, "text": "Hopefully, yeah. we've got Rob Warren from Bitcoin Park, who just wrote a book about mining, coming to talk about miner incentives, like what is the, what is like the full picture of how miners are getting rewarded for running hash rate and that sort of thing. I think that'll be a really interesting talk to have, especially at an audience of a large technical people. So, yeah, if you're working on Layer 2, like, you know, if you, great people to come to the event. Anyone who wants to learn more about, you know, how mining" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "35:48", "start": 2147.9, "text": "And you wanna learn more about what are the new options and algorithms that people are working on to get you paid better, and more like make sure that the money that you're getting is the money that you're meant to be getting, right? there's some really interesting projects happening, and then if you're a dev that is building a layer two or working on a project that needs to get transactions mined, this should be a really amazing venue for doing some workshops, learning about more stuff, Yeah, so that's like the, the plan. I think like you kind of mentioned earlier, like Bitcoin plus plus we always have a theme. so I think part of the reason I like doing themes is it makes it possible to run more events in a year and not end up with the same ten people at, at the event. So one of the really fun things about leaning into like what's going on in mining tech is really kind of this, this one. As I get to meet a whole new set of Bitcoin developers and really shine a light on work that they're doing that maybe wouldn't show up if it's like a general Bitcoin technical conference that's kind of focused on whatever, you know, the people who wanna talk about their work most end up talking about. so I'm, I'm really excited about like being able to bring in all these, like, you know, mining isn't really something we hear from that often, I think, on a technical sense. So I'm excited about that. I'm also excited about the- The other conferences we're running this year, because those are all gonna focus on slightly different angles or aspects of Bitcoin tech, in a broader sense. So we'll be in Riga ahead of Bitcoin Honey Badger in August, we'll be talking about privacy, you know, and how important privacy is for maintaining freedom. so I'm hoping to get some people from the Tor project there. I've been talking to them about coming to give a talk about their project, as well as various other like privacy projects across the space. If you're working on a privacy- protocol in Bitcoin, we'd love to have you come talk. You can find the place to apply to speak on our, on our website at the bottom, there's an \"Apply to Talk\" button. and then After that, we'll be in Istanbul in September, talking about scaling, kind of like the ZKP layer two ecosystem, so really focusing in on what are all these new fancy ZKP, bitVM, projects that, protocols that people are building, I think part of what they've been calling Bitcoin Season Two on. So we'll be focusing on a completely different ecosystem, completely different set of players and startups, et cetera. in October, we'll be back in Berlin And for our third event, it's called, I'm calling it our first Lightning Plus Plus, really trying to focus on bringing back like a lightning specific conference. the theme for this one is gonna be programmable payments, so really focusing on how does being able to make payments with lightning let us build more pro-programmable payment systems and infrastructure. I'm really excited about that one, I think it'd be really good, and hopefully really like focused on builders and people that want to build programmable payments systems, so that's, that's October, and then in December we'll be in Taipei for our first ever East Asia event, and that one's gonna be focused on sovereignty So I'm really looking to try and get as many wallet developers there, people building projects, like Startnine, and we're-- I don't know if they're gonna come, but we're trying to convince them to come. talk to someone who wants to do sort of more decentralized identity projects on Bitcoin. So really leaning into what does it mean to be sovereign with Bitcoin, and how does Bitcoin help you achieve like sovereignty as a thing? And what better venue to have that conversation than, Taiwan?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "39:28", "start": 2367.78, "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. 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.io. And now, back to the show. Fascinating. So yeah, I think it's interesting that there's these different, Streams, let's say, and themes, and so, yeah, we'll see what happens with that. I know, privacy has been, I guess in recent years has kind of taken a few beatings with what happened with, some of the CoinJoin, tech, but I know there are still people working on related ideas, things like PayJoin, silent payments, and, other ideas out there. So, Yeah, I'm curious to see what, what comes there. Do, do you like on the privacy topic, do you, do you see any ideas on the, you know, what, what are the main ideas that you see that could help Bitcoiners?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "41:07", "start": 2467.48, "text": "Yeah, I think there's a couple. I think there's the Payjoin stuff is a big one, so that's kind of taking some of the stuff that we pioneered on Lightning with interactive transactions and bringing it to a different layer in terms of like people that are just transacting on chain. it's also trying to, the other project is like silent payments, so this is the ability to kind of- I wouldn't say reuse addresses, but be able to send to addresses without having to have interaction between you, and making it harder to tell that it's related to the same wallet. So that's a really cool project. I think some of the other stuff that's like privacy related is probably more like the application layer. So, I think some of the VPNs that you can pay using Lightning. So, how do you preserve your privacy to exist as an individual online in a way that's like, not tracked and isn't relying on On a centralized like system, and do that, and how can like paying those things with Bitcoin or Lightning, et cetera, kind of like what is the complete picture of being a, a private individual and how does Bitcoin kind of play into that or not? now that I'm talking about it, would be really interesting to try and get someone from like a, maybe like see if I can get Chainalysis or something to come and talk about, combating privacy or something spicy, I don't know. but those are, those are just ideas. I'm still pretty early Saying speakers signed up. So if, if you're working on, if you know of any projects that are interesting privacy related projects in Bitcoin or maybe interesting protocols for privacy that Bitcoiners should know about, for building on, et cetera. I'd love to have talks or, recommendations of who to invite to be part of that conversation." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:54", "start": 2573.81, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting, and it's also how these different pieces fit together. So as an example, You might use some L2 to give you some transactional privacy, whether that's Lightning or Ark or some other L2 in the future. But then, how do you do that privately? How do you kind of interact with that system privately? And then, if you-- if things break down and you have to go back to chain, back to L1, how do-- can you still stay private then, or have you lost your privacy then? So it's kind of, there's all these other elements, around that, and then things like, okay, what are you doing about your networking privacy But there are other, anonymization or pseudonymous kind of techniques that people are using, on the privacy front. I guess I'm a little-- I'm not against it per se, but I'm just Maybe I'm a little blackpilled on it. I don't know. Maybe it's, maybe it's just gonna be hard to do, but let's see. I mean, I, I don't know. I'm not saying I have like a strong, it's not gonna, it's not gonna happen. I'm just saying it's gonna be hard. a lot of people have been trying for a long time to sort of make Bitcoin private or at least able to be used privately, and unfortunately, you know, look what happened with some of the CoinJoin," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:10", "start": 2649.74, "text": "Crypto and not as anti." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "44:13", "start": 2653.1, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I feel like with what some of what we saw with some of the coin joins stuff, it's sort of ironic because they ran a privacy project, but they weren't super private. I think this is kind of one of the things that happens when you start working on a project that you get really proud of, is that It's hard to be proud of what you're doing in public and also private about who you are. so that's- Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:35", "start": 2674.77, "text": "But I also just think it's just hard to build something because if you're building a company, well, you, you need to employ people, and then eventually you're gonna meet people, and then, you know, like I met some of the, yeah, I met like Samurai Wallet for a podcast, you know? Like, it, it just-" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "44:50", "start": 2690.26, "text": "Well, how do you get people to know about your project and use it? Like, even if let's assume it's like a decentralized organization, quasi-- that doesn't have like employees and it's a single person, but how are people gonna find out about your project to run it, right? Like, you have to tell people about it somehow, and that requires like getting on a network and making friends, and like, how do you know who to talk to? You know? Like, I think it's- Yes," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:15", "start": 2715.15, "text": "it's not an easy thing to do, and I think that probably is also why I've seen, like post the Samurai wallet and Wasabi wallet stuff, I've seen people sort of say, \"Well, no, it just needs to be decentralized and done at the protocol level, right? \" And that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be like confidential transactions on layer one, but it could also mean, okay, pay join built into more wallets or something, you know, silent payment built into more everyday wallets that aren't necessarily like a privacy wallet, like you're just doing it for Reasons or functionality or some kind of UX reason, but actually it also has the privacy benefit." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "45:49", "start": 2749.33, "text": "Exactly. And I think one of the things that's really interesting that's coming out is like this cross-input signature-aggregation stuff." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "45:57", "start": 2756.88, "text": "Right. Jonas is talking about some of that stuff, isn't he? Or has spoken about that." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "46:00", "start": 2760.15, "text": "Yeah. I think, and so that's the kind of thing that like kind of hits this really amazing sweet spot of Way better, like less data on chain, much improved privacy, like it's kind of protocol level, like coinjoin-esque stuff. So, this is a good reminder for me to reach out to them and make sure they come talk about their project at the event. Yeah. And" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:19", "start": 2779.04, "text": "they've got that, shielded CSV as well, so that might also be Might also have some privacy implications, but I, I don't know for sure. And I think maybe that, actually, that could also be interesting on the ZKP side of it as well. but even on the input aggregation side, that's gonna be kind of, that's along, you know, to get people on board. I mean, I guess it might be a good time now as well. It seems that there's been a bit, a bit of excitement amongst some of the developers, on CTV and Trezor from Stack as kind of, I guess, the argument" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:53", "start": 2812.89, "text": "Two well understood pieces and these kind of minimal changes at L1 would enable, you know, better ARC and better Lightning and other things. Do you have any thoughts on that or do, do you see that as being popular now amongst developers?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "47:09", "start": 2828.84, "text": "I mean, I think it's one of those things where you say it's well understood, but could you explain what CS, what Check Sign from Stack does?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "47:17", "start": 2837.19, "text": "Well, I'm not a developer, but I think, no, I mean, short answer is no, I wouldn't be able to just kinda give you a, a good answer." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "47:25", "start": 2845.3, "text": "Right, so I think like when people say that these things are like well understood, it's like, how well understood does it need to be before we have consensus on it? and if, you know, you're quite a smart person, you talk to developers about these things a lot, what's the minimum of understanding that someone like yourself, who, you know, is quite a vocal, like, leader in the space, would need to understand what that change is gonna be, I don't know. That's kinda like, I'm like, \"Well, yeah, maybe the education around how these work could be a little bit better. And how are we supposed to get consensus if a lot of people don't really know what they're talking about? They just know what the, the acronyms are.\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "48:11", "start": 2891.44, "text": "Right, and I think that's a, it's a totally fair point. I think I've probably, I've probably had people explain it on the podcast, but I can't remember the exact kind of You know, what exactly is, is, is, what exactly is being enabled here? All I've sort of heard or understood as an example is something like, if you have these two It's sort of like giving you-- you could potentially do like an L2 or something like that without having APO. That's kind of the level of understanding I have of it, but Yeah, certainly when I, when I said \"well understood,\" I wasn't saying I'm kind of deeply understanding it. My point there was, it sounds like, or at least what I'm trying to reflect is the argument I'm hearing people saying, they're saying, \"Oh, amongst technical developer community people, they have a good understanding of it.\" That was what I was getting at there, not that, not that I could kind of explain it." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "49:04", "start": 2944.15, "text": "But I think this is an important point about changes to Bitcoin, like who needs to understand it? I mean, this is like why base fifty-eight exists I think more people should understand it so that they can participate in conversations about what should get changed and why we should change it that way. So, I don't know, I guess that's like, I think it's, I think there's still s-more conversations to be had around helping people understand what the proposal is, In that sense." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "49:35", "start": 2974.91, "text": "Totally fair. Okay, on the kind of, scaling aspect of it as well. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on, you know, where things are. O-obviously, you've been around Lightning world for a long time. How are you seeing Lightning these days? Like, how are you seeing it in terms of where it's grown and where it's being used?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "49:57", "start": 2997.28, "text": "Yeah, I mean, I use Lightning more than ever for doing things in Bitcoin. Running a, a conference series means I have to pay more people with Bitcoin than I have ever in the past, if that makes sense. So to some extent, like- Lightning usage, I think, is going up. Actually, someone asked me the other day, like, so our, our tickets, you can either pay USD or, like, you can pay with fiat or you can pay with Bitcoin, and I haven't quite figured out what the, what the breakdown is between on-chain versus lightning, but it's on my to-do list, so, I don't have great stats on like usage that way. I think that, I think we're definitely seeing lightning, like, I mean, it takes such a long time for these protocols and decentralized, But I'm more bullish on Lightning as a payment rails than ever. I've been really impressed with what Phoenix is doing. We had a talk run by Chris Guida in Brazil two weeks ago about how to run a tiny Lightning node using Phoenix D, and how to get that up and running and had a couple of hackathon projects that were built using it. So I think like the tooling and Lightning, it's taken a really long time to get there, but I think we're actually getting to a point where, Running projects using Lightning is getting more accessible than it has in the past, specifically around like, you know, the merchants and bigger payment processors and that sort of thing. So, I don't know, I stay, I'm, I'm extremely bullish on like Lightning's footprint and the usage and its integration into the Bitcoiner payments, like, society, so to speak, and I think, I don't know, I think, I think it's only gonna get bigger. I think it, I think it really is like extremely useful, technology that is like Better than a lot of like other systems, and even though it is expensive and maybe harder for people to set up, yeah, I don't know, that's not much of an answer. I think it's fair to" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "51:49", "start": 3108.78, "text": "say it is more decentralized, and at the same time, it's more-- I'd say, I would say this, I think it is fair to say it's more decentralized than a lot of the so-called layer two, L-tweeze, in crypto land, and- It also is growing a lot in terms of volume, but it's that some of that volume isn't so easy to see. and I know the River guys have, have done, a report recently to sort of prove out and show, okay, we've gone and asked for data, actually it is growing in terms of volumes, and I think that's, Yeah, I think that's good, and I think it, the, the lesson, I guess, for me is really that things take a while to grow, to grow a network effect, right? It is the Lightning Network, and you gotta set up your nodes and set up your channels and all that, and, you know, I have a Lightning node, and I have some channels and things like that, but For most, yeah, I think for most people it just, it needs to be built into an app, obviously, and that's, you know, and then not just that, like we are in our, let's say, in our little Bitcoin echo chamber, and even outside of that, you've got kind of the shitcoin and crypto echo chamber, and then even further outside of that, there's all these fiat people who are still doing, you know, Western Union or they're still doing like crazy, you know, in-person things instead of just using Bitcoin and Lightning." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "53:11", "start": 3190.69, "text": "I think the thing about, I think one really interesting thing to talk about network effects is that payments follow networks, right? So like, bitcoiners doing business with each other make Bitcoin payment systems more used, you know? And so it's like, how do you get more people to be bitcoiners, and then how do you get more bitcoiners to do commerce with e-- between each other? Like, I feel like Lightning benefits when there's more bitcoiners running more Bitcoin businesses that are interacting with With other Bitcoiners. and so like as the number of people that use Bitcoin grows, then more Bitcoin businesses will be more viable, and as more, as more Bitcoiners like do commerce between each other, Bitcoin will get used more. and so like who becomes a Bitcoiner and who they're doing business with, I think, is actually kind of a big important factor for, the adoption of Lightning. So it's, yeah, and Bitcoin as a payment rails in general, Yeah, I don't know. So like watching Lightning grow, I think to me is really exciting 'cause it means there's more people that are using Bitcoin, like more Bitcoiners doing stuff with other Bitcoiners. Maybe that's not totally true, but that's how I like to think about it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "54:23", "start": 3263.14, "text": "Right. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think the other aspect of it is, is if you think of like a, like a Breeze as an example, right? The idea that they're just Breeze SDK, either the green light version or the nodeless version. The idea is that it's just like easy-ish for a business to implement this thing without really caring as much about all the details per se, and hopefully that then enables, you know, non-crypto people to do this stuff as well, not-- and not have to be a Bitcoin nerd, let's say, to do stuff." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "54:58", "start": 3297.56, "text": "Yeah, the tooling getting out there is so important, and it's really cool to see how much traction Breeze has gotten in terms of app integration, so that's really cool." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:06", "start": 3306.01, "text": "Yeah. Alright, well, look, let's finish up here, but, any final comment, and of course, where can people find, find out about, the event?" }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "55:15", "start": 3315.14, "text": "Yeah, so if you go to our website, it's b t c plus plus dot dev, or you can also type the shorthand, which is b t c p p dot dev. so that's a great place to find out stuff. If you wanna see all the previous talks that we've got, we've done an amazing job in the last few months of getting a lot of our talks from previous conferences up on our, on our YouTube channel, which you can also find a link to on the website. And then we're also on X and Noster at b t c plus plus. Nasdaq and Twitter also." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:47", "start": 3346.88, "text": "Fantastic. Well, listeners, all the links will be in the show notes as always. And Lisa, thank you for joining me, and I hope to see you at one of these events. can't promise, but I will try to make it to one." }, { "speaker": "niftynei", "time": "55:56", "start": 3356.19, "text": "Yeah, come hang out. Sounds great." } ] }