{ "episodeId": "SLP646", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "conor_okus": { "name": "Conor Okus", "role": "guest", "tag": "CONOR" }, "stephen_delorme": { "name": "Stephen DeLorme", "role": "guest", "tag": "STEPHEN" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:11", "start": 11.09, "text": "Hi everyone, and 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 today, Conor Okus, he is open source product manager over at Spiral, and also joining us is Stephen DeLorme, he is product designer at Voltage, and also co-founder of Of ATL Bitlab, which is a, a co-working space for bitcoiners. So, guys, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me." }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "00:38", "start": 37.78, "text": "Thanks for having me. This is my first time on the show, I just wanna say thanks, thanks for having me, man. Like, I've been, I've been a big fan of the show over the, over the years and of my bitcoin journey, so I just wanna give you your flowers." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:49", "start": 49.29, "text": "Oh, hey, thank you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, it's Some of these issues around design, and we're gonna get into all these things around, you know, BOLT twelve and human readable and all these things. but, let's just, I guess, talk about where you think, where you see things, you know, today in terms of, you know, how people are using Bitcoin, whether that's for payments, whether that's for savings. Where are we at today, and where do you kind of think there's need for improvement?" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "01:23", "start": 82.72, "text": "Do you wanna kick us off, Stephen? Yeah," }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "01:24", "start": 84.48, "text": "I think, I, I think one of the most mature things that I'm seeing with like Bitcoin user experience right now is just hodling, and because we, we have, you know, solutions for that already, you know, we have this wonderful thing called multisig, and there are companies like Unchained and Casa that will help you set those things up Up the right way, and if you don't want, you know, their help, you can do it on your own, and there's, you know, lots of tooling and hardware options. It's like, it, it's-- there's plenty of room to improve there, but it's a problem that I feel like has been kind of solved very well. Where I think things are lacking is still just the, the payments use case, and I think we've witnessed a lot of just kind of I don't know how to describe it, like mine share is just kind of drifting to a lot of different projects, which is good that people are experimenting with new technologies, but we have, you know, kind of like the Lightning side of things, and then within Lightning, you've got kind of like the, the L and URL side of things. Then you have people experimenting with ARC, you got people doing stuff with Liquid, you got people doing stuff, with eCash, and all of this is very interesting, but I- I am sometimes concerned that like we're, we're losing a little bit of the, the, the magical internet money, you know, download an app and it just kind of magically works. We're getting to the point where we have all these, all these different ways of, you know, interacting with Bitcoin, and sometimes they're interoperable and sometimes they're not." }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "03:02", "start": 181.98, "text": "Yeah, Conor? Yeah, no, I totally agree with everything you've said there. It's, it's obvious that, you know, Bitcoin has performed at, I guess, an A+ level when it comes to savings technology and, allowing people and empowering people to self-custody, custody their funds, And, you know, Lightning has taken us on a path where the payments use- we're getting closer to kind of the real, digital cash, use case, use case, but there are still, you know, a lot of challenges with regards to- Doing that in a self-sovereign way with a UX that is, abstracted enough for the average user to be able to use it without thinking much. So yeah, I mean, we'll talk about some of the details. to that effect in a minute, but yeah, like Stephen says," }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "03:53", "start": 233.04, "text": "people are experimenting and, and, there are a lot of trade-offs with regards to like some of these different technologies that Stephen mentioned, everything from Liquity to e-Ecash, but I don't, I don't see there being any less enthusiasm for people to, you know, wanna get involved in payments and stuff like that. I think it's just, the realization that the current state of the technology, requires us to make quite a, quite a lot of trade-offs and, and, how we help users understand some of those trade-offs is where, you know, UX, And, design can, can come in, I guess." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "04:31", "start": 271.41, "text": "Yeah, sure. Now, one thing that people like to compare with is physical cash, just because it has a certain level of privacy, it's a certain level of, you know, I just hand you that cash and see you later. What are we missing in the Bitcoin world, you know, when we compare with cash, physical cash?" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "04:51", "start": 290.89, "text": "Yeah, I guess, I guess, you know, some of the properties the reason we, we like cash is that it's, it's private, you know, typically it's just between you and whatever, you know, p- Merchant you're transacting with in person, secure in the sense that, you know, it's just, again, you and that person, unless someone, you know, comes and, and snatches that money away from you, and, pretty, pretty censorship resistant and, and, decentralized from that point of view. So if we want, you know, if we believe Bitcoin to be, you know, peer-to-peer electronic cash system, then we want a version of that that upholds those principles and, We do have, you know, we do have digital money now, but, my worry is that, many of those principles will be undermined and that, you know, I think that, you know, the average person doesn't realize that, you know, the current digital money system is one that can, you know, be heavily surveilled, heavily censored, and things of that nature. So Bitcoin gives us the opportunity to preserve the properties of physical cash and, you know, that- That's kind of what we're, what we're aiming for." }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "06:04", "start": 364.47, "text": "Yeah, I mean, you can, you know, right now with Bitcoin, it's like it's, it's got the, the hard money thing figured out, but it's the, you know, on-chain privacy. I mean, this, this topic has been beaten to death, but it's hard, right? There's a lot of different ways you can try and be more private on chain, but it's, it's been, you know- Classically very difficult, I think for new users. And then on the Lightning side of things, Lightning I think is way, way more private, but the problem is, is that the ways that we're using Lightning currently today aren't very private, and, you know, I think that creates a kind of like false impression with people that like, you know, that there's like false sense of security that, that their Lightning payments are private, when most of the time there's A, a lot of ways to, you know, intercept people's privacy on Lightning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:56", "start": 416.27, "text": "Yeah. so before we go further, I think one question, and I think it seems to be a common talking point, so I'm curious to get your reaction on it. Now You know, we are all, citizens of the, let's say, the Western Anglo sphere, right? Like, Conor, I presume you're, you're a UK citizen, Stephen, I presume you're American, I'm an Australian. Like, we all arguably don't have a fiat payments problem, right? It's, it's that most of us have a savings issue, and that's why most of us, we like to save with Bitcoin. So this seems to be kind of one of the points that I'm seeing, and I think there's some truth to it, this Now, Fiat banking and credit cards and debit cards and whatever, what do you think about that? Like, is it just that for most Westerners, they don't have a payments problem?" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "07:46", "start": 465.77, "text": "Yeah, it's so interesting you said that. I was speaking to another designer about this yesterday, and they were kind of, Yeah, they, they, they, they felt a little bit disillusioned in, in the sense that, are we kind of just, you know, chasing a problem that doesn't, doesn't really exist and, observing kind of what is and how it's being adopted and, you know, that the saving store of value digital gold narrative has proliferated far and wide throughout the ecosystem, but Part of me does feel like that does come from a slightly privileged point of view, if you do come, if you do live in an environment where you don't have a advanced or, you know, a, a strong Banking infrastructure, then, something like Bitcoin can be a, a, a step in the right direction. and so, yeah, I, I feel like that That perspective, we need to hear more about that perspective from people in those kind of environments, and, you know, you, you could argue like stuff like stablecoins and the rest of it, you know, go a part of the way to solving that issue as well, but I think we really need to kind of understand the perspective from people in those environments before making that judgment of like payments being a non-use case." }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "09:07", "start": 547.21, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I mean, like- We don't need, like, well, we don't necessarily need Bitcoin payments in the USA, right? Like, obviously a lot of us want them and would prefer to transact in Bitcoin, but it's like, it's one of those things where it's like, I've got a lot of options. I can use, you know, PayPal, I can use Venmo, I can use Cash App, so yeah, we don't, we don't need it the way that, that people in other countries, might, might need, need it. And I think that's part" }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "09:40", "start": 580.02, "text": "Bitcoin w- as payments versus Bitcoin as hodling, because, you know, I, I think the, the gold standard is like at least people in the US, I think, want to see like, you know, a self-custodial Cash App, right? Like something that's self-custodial, but it's like, it has the just pristine user experience that something like Cash App has, where delightful animations and, you know, just absolute minimal amounts of information, just enough information to help you make a decision. And y-y-you could actually argue that maybe that isn't what we should be chasing because, you know, like, like let's say you live in, in, in a country with, like, you know, where everything's censored and the bank system is collapsing, it's like, you know- The, the existing lightning wallets and the existing Bitcoin payments, you know, products might actually be good enough for you because it's like, it, it might be that, even though it's, yeah, yeah, it's a little tricky and there's some terminology you have to le-learn and there's some quirks you have to figure out, it's like, it's way better than the alternative that you're living with, which is like a banking system and a money system that just doesn't work. I, I, yeah, I mean, I agree with Conor that Definitely, we should be thinking more, i-in terms of the, the user interface and the user experience for Bitcoin wallets. We should be thinking about the people who actually need it most and not necessarily, just trying to kind of shove it into the Western world" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "11:05", "start": 665.26, "text": "Yeah. Okay, but let me, let me ask you guys the question this way then, because let me put it this way. For those of us in the Western world who already have access to, let's say, debit cards, credit cards, whatever, who generally speaking, at least for domestic payments, now international wires are a pain for everybody, and I think everybody, everyone in the world feels that, right? But at least for domestic standard payments Here's the question I wanna put it to you. Do you think if we somehow had, you know, better UX, that more people would actually use Bitcoin for these day-to-day payments, for, let's say, the non-ideological Bitcoin, like, non-ideological users? Or do you think it's actually more just like, it's not a product or a technical thing, it's actually more like a social thing that, you know, just not enough people have Bitcoin yet? What do you guys think?" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "11:59", "start": 718.51, "text": "Yeah, nice. It's a very good question. I mean, yeah, like you say, even take away the technical aspects of it, there's like regulatory stuff, there's like, you know, the, the, you know, spending your Bitcoin, at least I think in the US, you know, it's a taxable event, capital gains tax, accounting, capital gains tax, all of this kind of stuff. So, you know, there's, And then there's, you know, stuff around, trying to protect the building of non-custodial wallets and services and applications and that kind of stuff, and that's more- sits in, in the, in the legislative world. So there are, so like you say, yeah, there are some kind of like social regulatory government kind of stuff that might just have, Could be a, a, a sig- have a more significant impact than any UX improvement, any technical improvement. So, yeah, I definitely acknowledge that, but I think for me, the long term Value proposition of Bitcoin is intrinsically tied to payments and ability, and the ability for us to develop a circular economy, because if we get-- 'cause ultimately the people that are already wealthy are the ones that are able to accumulate most of, most of the Bitcoin, you know? So if we want to- You know, move to a world where wealth is more fairly distributed, then I think it's intrinsically tied to people's ability to spend, receive, store, store Bitcoin. They're all kind of tied together in my, in my opinion. But, yeah, like you say, there's, A whole host of other reasons that are non-technical and UX-driven that could be the aha moment for Bitcoin to see more mass adoption. So I definitely agree there." }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "13:47", "start": 827.25, "text": "Yeah, I think you bring up a great point, Stefan. I mean, to, to, to-- My answer is, you might be right. Like, it might be that just nobody wants to use Bitcoin payments in the USA. and I think that's something I'm, I'm, I'm comfortable with, 'cause like I said, I think, you know, there's, there's people who need payment systems, more. Having said that, I think there's still a powerful use case for Bitcoin payments in the US, just on the like social kind of, I'm not necessarily expecting that like, every grocery store in the US is going to be running BTC Pay server sometime in the next ten to twenty years, but what I do see from like organizing Bitcoin meetups here in Atlanta is that when people come in and like, they, they're like, \"Oh, wow, what is this? You know, I heard about this on the news, and wow, there's like this whole community of people who are like, you know, crazy about this stuff.\" And, you know, then, you know, the, the time comes when, you Payment, and they can download a wallet, and, somebody can send them some SATs, and it'll settle instantly. And everybody, and, you know, another, you know, another, you know, fun, you know, you know, flex, that me and my friends like to do, you go to a restaurant, and, you know, the, the, the waiter or waitress says, \"Sorry, there's too many people at this table, I can't split up the bill for whatever reason, because technology.\" And we're all You can all pay me back in Bitcoin. And just let everybody at the table, just be the first one to like stack Sats for the whole table, it's so awesome. and, and, and then, it's great, it's a magical thing because you can see like fifteen people pulling out their wallets, and everybody has a completely different wallet, and yet they all magically just talk the same language, and the person who covers the bill for the table just stacks Sats from, you know, thirty different wallets that are all interoperable. That's, I think the social in the world, it's the like word of mouth, social payments, one friend paying another friend for something. I think that's where the value is, that interoperability. But no, debit cards and NCR and credit cards and stuff like that, I don't think that's going away anytime soon in the USA." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "16:06", "start": 966.28, "text": "Yeah. Yeah, because look, I don't wanna be too much of like a wet blanket or whatever, because I am-- and obviously I'm supportive, and, you know, it's like some of us are, probably all three of us, we're all The ideological type who will use Bitcoin as first preference, right, where possible, like I will. Whenever I'm earning or spending, I'll use it first preference. But I also recognize maybe I'm an ideological person and I'm gonna use it for ideological reasons. A lot of other people aren't gonna be like that. They're just gonna be like, \"I just use this thing and I don't think too hard about it,\" you know? But nevertheless, I mean, it is a good thing that, you know, this technology is advancing and the UX on, at least, even if there are regulatory Legislative kind of hurdles and aspects of it and social aspects that we have to sort of overcome. There's also the, you know, technical user experience side of things, and so we should speak a little bit about those, and talk about what are some of the current- You know, if we were to, you know, go down to one more level of detail, what is the-- what are some of the current ways that we are facilitating our Bitcoin and Lightning payments, right? I mean, I, I guess I'll just share a quick example, like when I'm-- if I'm talking to another Bitcoin person, it's normally like, \"Hey, \" Do you want this on chain or lightning? Right? Or they might ask me, and then it's kind of, sometimes we might have to do this awkward dance of like, \"Hey, you invoice me for this much,\" and, y-y-you know, this kind of thing, and, you know, or it might be like, even if I have a lightning address, or even if I have bolt twelve, or even if I have human-readable address, their wallet can't pay to it. You know? So can you just walk us through what's the current state of play in terms of us doing Bitcoin" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "17:50", "start": 1069.81, "text": "Yeah, I mean, currently or over the last couple of years, the primary way for people to pay and receive has been using Bolt eleven invoices. and, and like you just described, the, the UX can be, a bit miserable at times because, you know, you have to generate an invoice up front or share some, share a QR code or share this kind of long alphanumeric string out of band that you copy and paste, and it looks ugly and it's a bit scary and you don't know if you've- Pasted it the right way, all of this kind of stuff. The, the, the QR codes are quite big sometimes as well, so they don't lend themselves to being, scanned well on maybe some of the older mobile devices and things of that nature. And just that kind of interactivity is something that most people aren't used to, right? You open your- Your, your banking app or your fintech app, and you just click a contact, you put in an amount, and you click send, right? We don't currently have that type of, user experience for For, for Lightning payments. and so that, that's bolt eleven, but then the commu-community identified that and kind of bandied around this kind of new protocol, LNURL. And it helped solve many of those issues by like enabling people to have this kind of, human readable, reusable payment identifier, And it, it, it's, it's great, it solved a lot of problems, but, going back to the idea of wanting to, preserve the properties of, of true digital cash, there are some things that, it has that kind of undermines that. So typically, You, you, a third party, web server is required to kind of fetch the lightning invoice on behalf of the user, and, you know, that third party could potentially be compromised, could censor, a user could block a user based on their kind of location, the global location, and, just through maybe either negligence or not even negligence really, but that server could be hacked or compromised in, in an any number of ways, and so yeah, one of the things that has, emerged is, is Bolt 12, which kind of gives you all of the things that, you know, you might, that, that you get with LNURL, LNURL, but provides kind of better privacy. you have this idea of reusable offers as well, so I'm gonna speak to a little use case a bit later, but you might, you know, pop a QR code somewhere and people can continuously pay that, so you don't have to generate an invoice upfront, which is nice for, for recurring payments and subscriptions and all that kind of stuff, and you can also generate a human-readable name via this BIP three, three five three protocol, which we can touch on a bit in detail in a bit, but it leverages the DNS system for you to be able to, generate a human-readable name as well. And, yeah, so that's kind of like some of the journey of, of how the community have kind of, tried to zone in on On improving the kind of payment, payment use case, I don't know if Stephen, you wanna touch on anything more? Yeah, I mean," }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "21:19", "start": 1279.33, "text": "yeah, I agree with everything you just said and, to, like, to your point, Stefan, about like the just the kind of dance of juggling all these different formats, you know, I think that's something that can be kind of just Solved by a lot of wallets if wallets just commit to being able to read a lot of different formats. and like by that I mean You know, right now, you'll have a wallet and it'll be like, \"We're an on-chain wallet,\" and so the only thing we look for when we detect, a QR code or a string that's input, all we're looking for is something that looks like an on-chain address. And then you have some wallets that are like Lightning only, and they're like, \"You know, we're only gonna look for...\" you know, Lightning invoices. And I think you can really, you know, just make an argument that like, if, if these wallets could, we're just capable of just at least being able to detect all of the different types of Bitcoin address formats, even if they can't ex-- currently pay to them, if they can at least detect it and deliver like a more user-friendly message, like, you know, we-- this, you know, we, we can't handle Lightning payments right now, you know, give us an on-chain address, like, provide some For the user, that would be a benefit, and especially for like lightning wallets too, like, you know, there, there's all kinds of ways that lightning wallets can be interoperable. You can have a lightning wallet that is capable of reading LN URL lightning addresses. You can have a lightning wallet that's, you know, also capable of, parsing bolt twelve offers. You could have a lightning wallet that, when it detects Chomian eCash, it, you know, goes through some service to melt the eCash into lightning. so there's a lot of different services there I think that, you know, part of, good UX, isn't always, just like a designer making it pretty kind of problem. Sometimes it's really an engineering problem, and what you really wanna be doing is like, with a wallet, like under the hood, kind of being able to handle a lot of different formats under the hood and making an appropriate decision about what to do. I don't really think users should be having to, you know, worry necessarily about what format. I think the wallet should be attempting as best as possible to handle Handle that for the user." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:35", "start": 1414.63, "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 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 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 passphrase, 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 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 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. Yeah, and I'll give a few quick examples as well. On top of what you mentioned, there are times where, let's say, you're trying to make a payment and then on one side, the payment fails because it's-- you get back an error saying, \"Oh no, this, Invoice doesn't have an amount, and I don't wanna pay any invoice that isn't a mountless invoice. Alright, that's one thing. And, and so for some reasons, I think historically there were like security implications of that, and I think some-- Nowadays, I think they've found ways to kind of make that more secure, but still, that's the thing that you sometimes get this compatibility issue. Another one is, the invoice might have expired, right? So they generated an invoice, and maybe they sent it to you, they're in another time zone, they sent" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:31", "start": 1591.49, "text": "it No, it's, it's, it's expired, you know? so then you sort of get, and then you also get these ones where maybe, as you said, like maybe that Lightning wallet can't speak bolt twelve per se. And so, y-y-we run into these compatibility issues around things. Now, at that, that said, there are times, there are cases I can give an example where, I know in South Africa at Pick and Pay, there was like, you know, this, this guy and this team, and I think they made like, like this Where app to scan the QR at the grocery store, but then what's, what some of the smart Lightning wallet developers did is they built that into their own apps so that people could just scan straight from the Lightning wallet app. And so that's like an example where they were sort of proactive about it, but, you know, we're still in this kind of incompatibility, zone right now, aren't" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "27:24", "start": 1644.04, "text": "we? Well, it, that's right, and, and, it, it, it can maybe be a bit, bit worrying. So like, if we, if we view, you know, bolt twelve in the, in the medium to long term to be the preferred kind of payment solution, at least for the Lightning Network, better privacy through blinded paths, ability to have like a human readable identi-ident, identifier leveraging DNS, where you, you know, you give it your, your bolt twelve offer. Or you give it a silent payment, address, something that's designed to be reusable. there's all this Terminology and interoperability that could end up just being a mess, even just there, we've, we've talked about many different things. We've got BOLT-12 offer, we have Lightning invoice, we've got on-chain address, we've got Bitcoin address, we've got silent payment address, we've got-" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "28:24", "start": 1703.58, "text": "what else have we got? We've got LN URL, we've got lightning address, like there's, so many different ways, at least the technical community are describing things, and much of that is being surfaced in user experiences, and, we have a job to try and abstract that the best we can. like if we're, you know, saying Bitcoin is the best money the current state of how these things are interlinking with each other, doesn't s- doesn't really suggest that. So, I guess one of the under-arching themes is that like when, when features that- Emerge that we think and, are gonna, preserve the properties that, that we value about Bitcoin. We really have to kind of band together as, as a community to kind of see them over the, the finish line. even if you look at stuff that has been, That has come into Bitcoin through soft forks like Taproot and things of that nature, we s-we still haven't necessarily got the level of adoption that we hoped, and there's obviously a number of reasons for that, business use cases, just takes time for adoption, people to up-up that software and all that kind of good stuff, but, it's not a given that just because we may have the features that enable- Us to preserve Bitcoin's properties that they will proliferate wide enough throughout the ecosystem for us to preserve the value of Bitcoin. So that's where, that's where I worry that, yes, we have this, this cool privacy tech or we have this cool payment technology, but we're unable to coordinate well enough to, make a real- Stamp in terms of how it's actually used in, in practice." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:13", "start": 1812.85, "text": "So I'm just, I'm curious then, do you see that improving over time or is it just we're gonna be stuck, you know, in this kind of incompatibility zone for a while? Is it, you know, maybe we need there to be actually more Bitcoin, let's say, retail payments, before it improves? What do" }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "30:29", "start": 1829.01, "text": "you guys think? I mean, I think it's a solvable challenge, we just have to, you know, push for it. Like for example, like, you know, You know, wallets to, you know, put on-chain and lightning invoices into a single QR that's at bitcoin QR dot dev. We got a lot of good feedback about that and a lot of people adopted it. It's like, sure, why not? why not try it? Why not at least be able to scan that? And, you know, we also had pretty good, you know, success, I think, with the with taproot dot org, like really trying to," }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "31:03", "start": 1862.56, "text": "you know, you know, see which, companies and You know, can we help them? Like, is, is, is there, is there a blocker? Like, because, and we've seen big support, the, like, the, it used to be when we launched that website, it was like the red column was like this and the green column was like this, and now it's flipped. Now a lot of, a lot, a lot of companies are supporting it, and I plan to do the same thing with Bolt 12 and Bit 353. Actually, I have, a, a designer named, so she has a, like, a fellowship with the Bitcoin Design Foundation. So we're working right now on testing out the compatibility of a lot of wallets with Bolt twelve and Bit three fifty three. so yeah, we're working for it, we're pushing for it. I think just broadly though, this, this go-- I think this is even deeper than just these particular bolts and bits, right? Because like, you have to think about it as like, if you're somebody developing a wallet, ideally you want people to use your wallet and find value from it, right? But let's There, that people have created. Well, if you have some kind of incompatibility problem with, like two other wallets out of that list, and somebody downloads your wallet and interacts with those two wallets where it has some kind of incompatibility problem, well, in, in the perception of the person using your wallet, they don't know if that's a problem with your wallet or the other person's wallet. And so it, it creates this like negative, like user impression. So then you have to think about it, this like very complicated- complicated graph of every single wallet out of that like batch of thirty wallets might have all kinds of incompatibility issues with other random wallets in that like graph, that compatibility graph. And it, it almost reminds me like it in, at the, Bitcoin++ in Brazil recently, there was a project that tried to do like, fuzz testing, differential fuzz testing on different lightning implementations. I almost kind of think we need like, a compatibility Ability testing, like project between all the different, like, lightning and on-chain wallets out there, just being able to, like, test out, like, if I take, for example, Phoenix, and I try to pay the default payment method from Strike, Cash App, Moon, Aqua, you know, Pick Your Poison, all of those, does it throw an error? Does it succeed? Something like that, and then, you know, go through the list with all of them. And it sounds like a lot of work, but the thing is, like, I think actually as a A wallet developer, I feel like you should be incentivized to do this kind of brute force testing with other wallets in the industry, because if you don't do that kind of brute force testing with other wallets in the industry, you know, you're-- you, you might, you know, you might be leaving your users in a situation where they don't know what's going on. So I think we just need to be more vocal about this in the industry. I think we need to push for more projects to do this kind of compatibility testing, because I know it, it sounds like one of those just kind UX problem, that's not an interesting engineering problem to work on. But look, it might not be like a fascinating cryptographic engineering problem to work on, but it actually could be the thing that helps somebody actually use your product." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:23", "start": 2062.83, "text": "Yeah. Now, I'm not a wallet developer myself, so I, I'm, you know, speaking from ignorance here, but it could be maybe they are themselves pushed for time or pushed for funding. They don't have, you know, there could be reasons, you know, good reasons, on their side as to why they haven't done this yet. It could be, you know," }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "34:43", "start": 2083.43, "text": "oh, absolutely. Sorry to cut in, but I mean, I don't wanna come across like I'm saying like wallet developers are bad people, 'cause I know, I mean, I've Over the years, and a lot of times it's like, you know, one person like maintaining a big project, and they don't necessarily have the time, they especially don't have the time to get a designer involved to, like, you know, make everything look pretty, and they really, really don't have the time necessarily to do all this kind of testing. And so that's why I kind of like to put the call out there that, like, if you're, if you're a designer, if you're interested in user experience, if you're interested in product management, things like One of the best impacts on Bitcoin UX is working directly with wallet projects and like getting involved in these projects, like not being, not going to a wallet, don't go to a wallet developer and tell them like, \"Your UI is ugly, I'm gonna redesign the whole thing.\" Like, don't do that. Like, what you wanna do is you wanna try and find a problem that their users are facing and you wanna solve that in like as minimal a way as possible. Be like, \"I think if you moved this button here, or you made this button brighter, or you fixed the incompatibility It would, it would make things better for your users, and if you do that and like provide a very clear, concise fix for that and try your best to shepherd that, like, that, that fix across the finish line and get it merged, you build, trust, you build a working relationship with these wallets, and, then that opens the door to, big, working on bigger issues and bigger collaborations in, in the future. things like these wallet compatibility things, I think that's an example Example of something that's, it's actually kind of low hanging fruit. If you can work with a wallet developer, like, let's say you, love, I, I'm like, who should I pick on? pick an open source wallet. Like, let's say you love, you know, Moon or something like that, and you'd be like, \"But you found an incompatibility, it doesn't work with this one particular, you know, wallet format or wallet type. Open an issue, provide a suggestion. I think the error message should sh- say this" }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "36:52", "start": 2212.35, "text": "make that happen and build that working relationship, because I think that this is, an opportunity where UX people can actually, contribute to, wallet projects in a really, really meaningful way that doesn't necessarily have to result in a ton of engineering time for the wallet developers and doesn't necessarily, have to involve redesigning their entire interface." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "37:16", "start": 2236.1, "text": "Yeah, totally fair point. And it could also be language difficulties too, right? Like over time, there are more and more wallets in different parts of the world, and maybe they're not, they're not all gonna be English facing or English first. Kind of, interfaces. So that could be another whole thing." }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "37:33", "start": 2253.2, "text": "Yeah, and just to round off the wallet adoption, comments, I think, yeah, you know, wallet teams and developers, have their priorities, but I think if they were gonna- You know, prioritize, prioritize something like Vault 12, then they'd probably-- you kinda have this kinda chicken and egg problem, I think is that the right way to describe it, where, any- New kind of payment protocol, like if you're a wallet team, you, you don't have the reassurances that if you set up your wallet to be able to receive using this payment protocol, that other wallets can actually pay to it. So," }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "38:11", "start": 2290.83, "text": "wallets can choose to prioritize paying to, paying and sending to like, for example, office and invoices, and A human, bit three five three human readable names without, degrading the experience. that's quite an important thing, I think, so they can actually implement pay into those things and then, you know, wallets Can have confidence that when they start to implement in, on the receive side of things, that there's a, a, a strong array of wallets within the ecosystem that actually, actually support it. So you kind of have that problem a little bit. And then I think on the user side, there, there are a few things that I think can help, Bring about some enthusiasm and urgency to maybe get some of this stuff implemented. some use cases I like is like obviously Nosta, like Nosta zaps and stuff like that. what does, you know, Nosta look like when, you can, you know, have a, you know, bolt of offer, that you've- Got, got from either a, a, a self-hosted node or one generated in a mobile wallet like Phoenix or something like that, and, and showing it, Showing the experience through like a Nostalgia Land Primal, see what that's like. But there's also interesting stuff like streaming. So," }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "39:35", "start": 2374.73, "text": "I've never understood really why people watch other people play games, but it's, it's, it's very popular, yeah. It's popular and people do it and people are like in the live chat sending donations, sending all of these kind of tokens and things around, on Twitch, on YouTube, on X, and, You know, there, there is something I, I, I did a kind of demo recently that showcased how you can use like an, a free open source tool like OBS and, you know, have a Boltov offer on the screen and you, you know, as you're doing your live stream, you, your users can scan the QR code and you can have some kind of, you know, animations flowing throughout the screen and like different types of interactions happening and That's, it can either be a plug-and-play replacement for the already existing payment processes that are providing that experience already through streams or an additive piece of technology that gives, the opportunity a little bit more Yeah, exactly, can open you up to a, a wider audience perhaps who like interesting use cases, use cases like that which, where, can, can fit in, can be additive, can be, can replace my- Start, you know," }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "40:59", "start": 2458.59, "text": "might start kind of that, that's more of a cult-culture thing. If all of a sudden people just start seeing like their, their favorite streamers receiving, like, put up this QR, yeah, put up this QR code, receive self-sovereign Bitcoin, no middlemen, no, delay on their payments after their stream, instant settlement, all of that good stuff. and the, the reason I think- Streamers and gamers are a good use cases 'cause they're somewhat technical, so if there's a, a product that's packaged in a way that they can, you know, maybe either self-host a node, run a node locally on their machine, have some- Clean, sexy UI that can help them move their SATs to an off-ramp into the fiat world or something like that. it's not too big of a stretch, I don't think. I know we've-- like, the average user might find a lot of the technical stuff hard, but people who are already into gaming and doing computers and all this kind of stuff might not find that stuff as difficult. Yeah. So I quite like that use case. It's a use case I'm gonna be trying to learn more about as well, and, yeah, some, some more of that Open the imagination of, of people as possible." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:14", "start": 2534.05, "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 To the show. Yeah. And on this, actually, I'll just make a quick point as well. this reminds me Rumble. So Rumble recently took an investment from Tether, a big investment, and they started holding Bitcoin, and they've also mentioned that they're gonna start doing a Rumble wallet, which would be, I think, Bitcoin and Lightning and stablecoins. And they're, obviously, they're a, they're like a YouTube, right? They're like a streaming platform as well, and so they are gonna have this built in. Now, will it be Maybe not, I don't know. but hey, it's a start, and if it's like natively built into the platform, that's already kind of gonna do a lot, at least on the social level, 'cause they're all gonna start taking donations in Bitcoin and stablecoin and whatever, so, you know, that's, that's an example, and what we might start to see is if they do it, then other platforms might start being like, okay, here you go, and then, you know, maybe they can build in things in a very simple way" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "44:09", "start": 2649.38, "text": "Alt twelve, or you just paste in your human readable thing, and then, boom, now it's kind of all the stuff is done in the background, and they can still take their self-custodial lightning payments, right? So there are, there are ways and directions things are gonna go now. I think part of that is the social change, right? Part of that is kind of like, now it's the Trump administration, now it's kind of pro-crypto You know, I think there's gonna, we're gonna see a lot of movement on that side. Yeah, and I think a lot of" }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "44:35", "start": 2674.82, "text": "people really have under, underestimated how much Tether is going to change things. Like, that, that news was big, and it's like, look, I, I, I don't need Tether personally, like I'm in the US and I've got the, you know, access to the US banking system, but I think there's people who do, and, you know, just some of the stories I hear about Tether I don't know, it's interesting. I'm, I'm definitely, you know, I've, I've got my own reservations and skepticisms to some degree, but at, at the same time, I think, you know, that there's a lot of people who weren't interested in Lightning and now they are interested in Lightning because of Tether. So my, my hope is that, you know, now that we're going to have stable coins on Bitcoin apparently, I'm hoping that makes it even easier for people to get to Bitcoin itself, right? Like if you- Have a lightning wallet that supports, both a Taproot asset, Tether, and Bitcoin. You know, there could be an easy way to swap between the two for the user. And, you know, if someone wants to, you know, imagine a, a wallet UI where it's like, maybe, you know, it's like a, a savings wallet, that allows you to receive, you know, Tether dollars from people, but you can set up kind of like, for every lightning payment where I receive a dollar worth of Tether, put twenty-five percent You could almost create like a, a kind of, user experience that encourages people to stack Sats and kind of like, you know, redirect some money to savings, kind of like where you might have like, on, on some apps will allow you to like, automatically put a portion of your paycheck in Bitcoin or automatically put a portion, in, some other savings plan or round up your, you know, whatever you do to the next dollar and invest that round up. Maybe you could do something like that. Maybe, maybe Tether on Bitcoin Will open up these kinds of UX possibilities for us." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "46:33", "start": 2793.05, "text": "Yeah. So I think, yeah, and I guess bringing it back to just UX and design, that will be, I guess, sometimes it's down to the app creators, developers, entrepreneurs, builders to sort of maybe they need to be a little opinionated about how They think the user should or what's the default? What's the sensible default that maybe they-- maybe if that person cares about stablecoin, but then there's an easy way to, to flip it into Bitcoin, like you said, so they can kind of, if they're a, a fiat person and they need stablecoin or they want fiat, but then there's kind of this app option in the app to kind of go to Bitcoin, you know, maybe that's kind of one way that it could happen. so I guess, just kind of rounding off the kind of the bolt twelve Names aspect, as you mentioned, Conor, that, it's more important to have bolt twelve or human readable names send capability than receive. And I think, s- I, I've mentioned, I think Steve Lee mentioned that to me, maybe offline, a while ago. And I, yeah, it makes sense, right? Like it's easier to build in the payment capability before you build in the receive capability. and then once you sort of see, okay, there's a lot of payments on this, well then, okay, now it makes sense" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "47:47", "start": 2867.44, "text": "Right, because even what we see from wallets is, a distinction between on-chain and Lightning. So you might have these two tabs, right? You might have like a Bitcoin tab on chain, and you have a Lightning tab, which is default to Bolt 11, and then you can kind of pay, you can copy this on-chain address, but you can also copy this longer, LN invoice. And then, so if you wanna res-support Bolt 12, do you have like another? Tab with, with Bolt 12 and then you can copy the offer and then it just gets very, gets a, can get a bit nasty and messy very quickly. So, yeah, that's one of the reasons we are kind of, Suggest doing the, the cents side first 'cause you don't get that kind of degradation in, in UX. And, yeah, all, all of these things to say that, just to, to, to speak to the design aspect of it as well, like you, you did mention that Maybe designers should be quite opinionated about some of this stuff. we, we, we, we li-we, we live in an ecosystem where, you know, people aren't shy to, to, to express their opinions about stuff, as whether it be from a technical point of view, whether it be from a political point of view, and, I don't tend to find designers to be, too inclined that way, sp-specifically, Stephen, you can, can correct me if I'm wrong at any point, But nonetheless, I, I still think, w-w-we, well, what we have, we have a community of designers, we have the Bitcoin design community that is something Spiral helped start and helped, has helped fund over the years and tries to, you know, create a place for designers to come together to like discuss these things, try to come to some level of quote-unquote consensus about be- best practices on, on stuff, and that's, resulted in a Bitcoin design guide that You know, if you're a single dev trying to build a wallet or you're a product team trying to build a wallet, you can reference and try to use to help overcome some of your UX challenges because there's no doubt that there is gonna be some instances where, the experiences next to identical across some wallets, there are gonna be use cases where something more tailored is required. but nonetheless, it's still, It's still something I don't think people are super familiar with, appreciate the value of just yet, and so, yeah, we hope it continues to try and like play a role in influences, influencing some of the outcomes of what we see actually being built, but it might, it might require, like you say, Stephane, some, some more like opinionated, Wastes, yeah. I see." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "50:43", "start": 3042.67, "text": "Yeah, and I mean, that, yeah, there, there might be other, others who aren't so opinionated, right? And they just sort of leave it to the user. But sometimes, I mean, if you think about, a cash app or a, whatever, a Zelle or these kinds of things, it's not that they ask the user a lot of things. It's, it's, they're quite simple and they're just very, do this, do that, and that's it. And they, they've obviously done Aspects of it that are, those are a different thing, but at least on, on the technical and the design and the UX side of it, these are things that can be improved. So, yeah, I guess finishing things up then, what are the best places for people to find out more? of course, we need to make sure people share this episode with any builders out there, but what are some resources and, what are some, I guess, closing thoughts and closing messages you wanna leave for people? Well, oh," }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "51:38", "start": 3097.69, "text": "sorry, do you wanna go, Conor?" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "51:39", "start": 3099.01, "text": "No, go Stephen, I let you go." }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "51:41", "start": 3100.78, "text": "Well, I'll say, just on, you can go to bolt12.org, and you can learn about bolt12 there, and, that's, you know, also where I hope to start publishing some of the, kind of compatibility tables and stuff to that effect. if you wanna learn about BIP353, you can of course, re-read, read the BIP itself. if you just wanna experiment and tinker with it, me and my friend Chad launched a website called twelve And make your own human-readable address there. it also has an API so that, as a wallet dev, if you just want to use our domain name to make, human-readable addresses, you can just use our API. but also, you know, Conor has some resources I think he can point to where you can kind of teach you how to, do it on your own. I would say just on, you know, another note in terms of like other things, you know, outside of just, bolt twelve and BIP three fifty three that I'm, you know, currently focusing on right now, you know, I've been shifting a little bit of focus to mining lately, and just, you know, like protocols like Stratum and, you know, Braidpool and, you know, BitX and stuff like this. Every" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "52:54", "start": 3174.08, "text": "designer I speak to, sorry to cut you, every designer I speak to wants to get into mining now." }, { "speaker": "stephen_delorme", "time": "52:58", "start": 3178.26, "text": "Well, it Well, well, for me personally, it's that I've just realized that so many people coming into Bitcoin are fascinated, by it. When you've been in Bitcoin for a long time, you kind of forget how much, how fascinating it is to people when they're coming in, and there's so much enthusiasm about it, and so I'm really trying to see if I can take this enthusiasm that I'm seeing, not just in Atlanta, but all over, and like redirect this into stuff that works on minor decentralization. So we have a, a global hackathon that we this, June, called Battle of the Mine Hackers, it has a hardware, software, and energy track, where you can, compete, in the hackathon, and we're hoping to get, people-- We're just hoping to kind of direct people's enthusiasm around mining towards working on miner decentralization stuff. but yeah, that's, that's kind of my, my new recent fascination. but yeah, turn it over to you, Conor." }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "53:55", "start": 3235.27, "text": "Yeah, yeah, thanks. I mean, everything you said, I've got a YouTube channel as well, it's called Bitcoin Developers. I've got some videos about how you can kind of self-host your own kind of, Lightning node and human readable name and all the like kind of good stuff. But yeah, all the resources Stephen said. Also, if you wanna look at specifically Bolt Tor, Bit 353 from a UX point of view, the Bitcoin Design Guide has some, Some guidance in there about what that might look like from a more of a product point of view, so do read that as well. and that's pretty much it. I mean, o- last thing is, yeah, like Stephan, we'd love for you to be able to, like, maybe at some point, put up a A bot twelve QR code on, on your, on your podcast videos and, people can, you know, leave donations and tips twenty four seven, whether you're going live or after the fact. So, if you're interested in it yourself, like, do, do, speak to Stephen, do speak to myself, and we'll see if we can, we can get that going, 'cause it takes like people like, people like you who are, you know, popular in the community, you know, if you see value in it and, and, people Attention and, maybe think about doing it for themselves as well. So" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:15", "start": 3315.24, "text": "yeah, I mean, it's a fair point. I, I do have a BOLT twelve, I have, I have a few, right? Like, so I have like, like an LN URL from my BTC Pay, I have like Phoenix with the BOLT twelve and also a human readable. So I do, and I also have a Nostra one as well over at Primal, but I just, I've never really thought to actually put the QR on my podcast and stuff. I guess it's, it doesn't feel like the norm on YouTube. Of course. I mean, I guess I could do it, but it just doesn't feel like the norm. Yeah, maybe that, yeah, there's" }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "55:42", "start": 3341.99, "text": "definitely, we need to think around UX around it and, and that kind of stuff, but yeah, maybe it's maybe something to experiment" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "55:50", "start": 3349.56, "text": "with, you know? Yeah. In the Bitcoin world, whether they're wallet developers or builders, I think it'll be a valuable episode for them, and, yeah, let's leave it there. Links will be in the show notes as well, so bolt12 dot org, twelve cash, Bitcoin Design Guide, and, yeah, Conor and Stephen, thank you for joining me today. Thank you so much." }, { "speaker": "conor_okus", "time": "56:15", "start": 3374.59, "text": "Thank you." } ] }