{ "episodeId": "SLP752", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "hermann": { "name": "Hermann", "role": "guest", "tag": "HERMANN" }, "joshi": { "name": "Joshi", "role": "guest", "tag": "JOSHI" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.0, "text": "Hi everyone, welcome back to Stefan Laverre podcast. Rejoining me on the show today, Herman, the founder of Bitcoin Ekasi, Bitcoin circular economy in Mossel Bay, South Africa, and Yoshi, who is a core Fedimint contributor and developer, who also appeared on the show a little while back talking about Fedimint updates and Fedimint updates there. So let's, yeah, g-give us a quick catch-up. I know you guys have some updates to share on Fedimint and, what you guys have been doing in Bitcoin Ekasi. Yeah" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "00:30", "start": 30.0, "text": "We discussed the last time I was on the show, we are now able to, run Fedimint on, on Start Nines or on Umbrels or like other node in the box system or really any box that does have internet on it. You don't need any public IP anymore, you don't need to run this in the cloud, you don't need to configure a domain whatsoever, which solved many ails that the system had, was the biggest hassle in setting it up. this was up and coming the last time we talked about, maybe a year ago, got finally released in October and was, shortly after, deployed by Hermann and his fellow guardians, in, for Guardian Federation on Start9." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:15", "start": 75.0, "text": "Excellent. And Herman, give us the update from your side." }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "01:19", "start": 79.0, "text": "yeah, I mean, this is the second, second iteration of, of this federation. we did run a test one first, and we didn't really- Broadcast that too wide, was just testing. the one we're running now is the second, second federation we set up, and this one really is, being used as, as an everyday Everyday solution, I mean, I've been making transactions on it almost every single day. I used it when I was traveling to Kenya recently. it blew my mind that, you know, I'm halfway across the African continent and my mobile wallet is somehow connecting, it feels like magic, somehow connecting back to a Start9 device sitting in my office and coordinating transactions between six other devices distributed across the province. it's, it's just insane, and it's, it's been very reliable. the first one was a little shaky, the setting up, there were some issues to iron out. but yeah, this one we're really onboarding people and we're using it for real." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:17", "start": 137.0, "text": "Yeah. And yeah, just a quick background for listeners, just to make sure everyone's caught up and following along. What we're talking about here is a federated eCash protocol called Fedimint, and then this is, you know, applying that and making it, let's say, practical for a federation, and in the context here, guardian means like, it's like, in this example, it's like a se-- there are seven guardians, and it's, they are signing the transactions to allow, you know, on-chain transactions and this kind of thing. And then I Gateway that's handling the Lightning component of it, and so I guess, yeah, do you wanna, do you guys wanna share any thoughts on, how the migration went?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "02:59", "start": 179.0, "text": "Well, the, just one more thing. So the new federation has seven guardians to make it more reliable and, you know, more secure. And, migrating between federations really easy. So you just go to the dashboard of the old federation for the, for the guardians, you, configure a shutdown date and you configure the federation to migrate to, and then the users have it displayed in their app as a warning and with a, single click. They can join the new federation and then, migrate their funds. Yeah. So we usually recommend to set a shutdown date, maybe two or three months in the future, run them parallel for a while, so the users they see as-- they see it as a banner, but they can still use the old federation and then migrate at their own time when they, when, when they get the chance. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "03:51", "start": 231.0, "text": "And, Herman, from your side, when you're interacting with the end users, what does it look like for them?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "03:57", "start": 237.0, "text": "I mean, I, it's, it's, it's kinda hard sometimes not to get into the weeds of eCash, like I try to. I'm very tempted 'cause it's so fascinating. but try and, try and onboard them like I would to any other Lightning wallet. it, it feels a lot more comfortable doing it. Like I've, I've always had some reservations onboarding someone to like a fully custodial Lightning wallet. It's always been the easiest way to get someone to use Bitcoin for the first time, but you have this little nagging thought in the back In the trade-offs here, but you oftentimes don't have, don't have time for that. So it's a lot more, it, it just feels more comfortable onboarding someone to something that you know is, is slightly better than a, well, depending on who they are, a lot better than a centralized, centralized wallet, like Wallet of Stoshi or whatever. So, but from the user's perspective, it's, it's like, you know, it's, it's like onboarding someone to a regular Lightning wallet, it's not, not much different. They, obviously the one, the one extra step is just joining the federation, and that can sometimes cause a little bit of confusion 'cause people are used to downloading an app, and once they do that, they're in the wallet. Whereas with this, you gotta download the app and then join the federation, which is a, a slight extra step, but it's, it's really super easy. I've onboarded all kinds of people." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "05:14", "start": 314.0, "text": "And, Josiah, can you tell us a little bit about this conduit wallet?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "05:18", "start": 318.0, "text": "Yeah, so, we got a new wallet, that I developed over the last couple months. it's, so many people will be familiar with Fedimint, like that's the wallet we had, for like years, really. but in the last couple of months, we have had another wallet in the app store, which is much more minimal, so it's just focused on being a, a Wallet just for payments, it has a simpler user interface as a result, and it also i-integrates a few more features like specific for like Herman and this region in South Africa. So we support money badge QR codes, if your listeners are familiar with it, we support biometric authentication and so forth, and generally like support all the latest standards of the Fedimint project, and that's, that's the app that we are currently, currently primarily" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:12", "start": 372.0, "text": "I see. So you would summarize it then as you've done some more localizations and i-is it slightly different features to what Fedimint offers? And just for listeners to be clear, Fedimint is the protocol, and you can have different apps that are operating on that protocol. That's important. And so this is like a competing app or a different wallet, right?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "06:30", "start": 390.0, "text": "Exactly. So, the, like, yeah, slightly different features, but more importantly, it's like a competing app. Both of them, like Fedimint and Conduit both work with federations the same way. and, most important difference is that Conduit is much more, minimal and just focused on payments," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "06:49", "start": 409.0, "text": "yeah. And so, what was the feedback from the users there on Conduit Wallet?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "06:55", "start": 415.0, "text": "I mean, it's, I, I think, the, the only confusion really is when people try to understand what eCash is. Other than that, the feedback has been it just, it just feels like another Lightning wallet. it's really straightforward, simple to use. there was a little bit of confusion with a few people that this, this idea that you can, you can send eCash in a way that's slightly different from sending SATs over Lightning, especially when you're transacting between people in the same federation, it's, it's a slight, Adjustment to make because you really do have a, a couple of different ways to send that, so that, that, that, that was interesting and I, I wasn't always sure how to approach that, whether to try and explain the whole eCash thing or whether to just kind of skip over it and, and not, not try and explain it, but people had questions about it and that did cause a little bit of confusion in the beginning." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "07:44", "start": 464.0, "text": "Let's, let's dive into that a bit. What were the typical questions they would ask you and how would you then explain it?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "07:50", "start": 470.0, "text": "Well, I, I think the biggest thing people wanted to know what, it, it like, what is it? And then, you know, how, how is it a separate, how is it a separate protocol from Bitcoin, but, but backed one to one, and how does that work? you know, there was a little bit of people a little bit, a, a little careful around that. but I think, I mean, it, it, the biggest, the biggest, the biggest bonus I think is the fact that, is that people w-when, once they realize, I'm really surprised how much of an impact fees have on people's way of thinking about transactions. and this is one of the reasons why these fully custodial Lightning wallets have always been so popular is because when you transact blink-to-blink, like a BlinkNow has a self-custody option, but when I was still fully custodial or when you transact wallet of Satoshi to wallet of Satoshi, there's, there's literally zero fees, and, and people tend to prefer those. And with the eCash, when you're in the same federation, there's also zero fees. But But the, but the custody isn't in some other strange foreign place, it's, it's, it's localized. And so the fees, the-- That's what excited people most, that's the most positive feedback I got when onboarding people, and in these sort of typical rural communities, the fact that you can actually send one of these, these transactions and it's literally zero fees. It, it kind of competes with the fully custodial wallets, on, on that front. That, that was the most positive feedback I would get. But then on, on the flip side, it For people to get used to this idea that, because eCash is fundamentally different, like you, you know, you can literally send eCash over a messenger like BitChat or WhatsApp or whatever, which is different from sending and receiving over Lightning" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "09:33", "start": 573.0, "text": "I see. And I guess for listeners, quick explanation there, the idea is eCash, you know, you can deposit Bitcoin and sat into, you know, the Lightning gateway, and then the Fedimint is crediting you with your eCash balance, and you have tokens, basically. These are eCash tokens. And I, I guess the point would be also that you have a, an increased privacy in that context, because the Fedimint operators don't necessarily know who holds what tokens, and it's kind of, yeah, blinded in the way way that you can transfer the eCash around, and it wouldn't be as easy to, let's say, \"Ah, I'm gonna seize, you know, Stefan's eCash tokens.\" You can't do that so easily in eCash compared to some of the other models. So I guess these are some of the different trade-offs. And I guess while we're there, let's ask the question then, because some people will say, \"Well, what about liquid-based solutions or Spark-based solutions or ARC-based solutions? How does the Fedimint style, and this, you know Differ from those and why this one over those?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "10:36", "start": 636.0, "text": "Yeah, well, to Liquid, it's a very straightforward comparison. Like both of them are like federated, the main difference is that there's one Liquid federation, but with Fedimint there are many and people can run their own. So ideally, you know your own, you know the own operators like somewhat, you know, they're local to your region. also, the privacy is a bit different. So, the, Liquid Federation, they hide amounts, that is, Fedimint doesn't hide amounts. We like we like sever the transaction from each other. So with eCash, you can't-- you see the amount in a transaction, but you can't, there's no transaction graph. With Liquid, you have a transaction graph, but you don't see the amounts. also, like, Liquid doesn't have eCash at all. and like one more thing, Is that, Fedimint is on-chain native. So you can receive directly into a Fedimint and you can send on-chain directly from a Fedimint. There are no swap services in between, that need to like mediate this, which is, the case in, w-which is the case with Liquid, yeah. So, in, in total, in Fedimint, you have three different rails: Lightning, on-chain, and eCash, and, they all work like optimally In a sense, yeah. So it feels like any custodial Lightning wallet with a professionally managed Lightning node, Herman and his federation, they also don't run their own gateway. We, we run an untrusted gateway that, you know, provides a service to them. And, you know, on-chain, the federation is gonna execute by itself, so even if the gateway goes away, on-chain is still there, eCash also still works, and, the Final question, comparison to Spark and Ark, I couldn't do it off the cuff. Those systems, they work entirely different, and, it's like, difficult to make any comparison there. It's just a completely different thing." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "12:40", "start": 760.0, "text": "I see. I guess the reason I'm asking though is because nowadays, as both of you are probably well aware, some of the previously custodial apps like Wallet of Satoshi and Blink have now transitioned to Spark. So Wallet of Satoshi now has a Spark backend, and I believe Blink just- Recently came out with a Spark via, I believe, Breeze SDK. So they're doing it via the Spark model, and I guess that's gonna be, something people will think about as, okay, should I use a Fedimint style? App or should I use a Spark version of an app? And maybe the difference is something like the costs are cheaper or the privacy is better or something like that." }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "13:19", "start": 799.0, "text": "I can't speak to the costs of Spark and Ark. But like one comparison that you could make is that the approach with Fedimint is that you have, many smaller federations instead of having a single global service provider, like the case with Spark." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "13:38", "start": 818.0, "text": "I see. Yeah, and I guess even in the Spark, in our case, they could theoretically have multiple, but they currently, it's sort of, well, I think there's Spark and there's, I think Flashnet, and I, I don't know the exact details of that, but I think thei-- their idea is to eventually have multiple Spark entities also, but nevertheless, I guess the point is that wouldn't necessarily be runnable on like, maybe it's not gonna be something that people could run on like an Umbrel or a Start9 kind of thing. So it's a little," }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "14:07", "start": 847.0, "text": "I mean, you're also, you're also comparing it to, to something that is self-custodial to the individual, whereas the Fedimint, setup is at least eventually, bringing it down to a community level, because there are, like, there are a lot of people that probably will never take self-custody, but you don't want to force them onto a custodial solution, yet at the same time they probably-- So, so you wanna provide something that's a little bit more friendly in terms of providing access, should they make some fatal error. If you, if you entrust somebody that's not capable of taking self-custody with self-custody, they make a fatal mistake, that's it, they've lost everything. whereas if you have this community custody setup, and at, at, at the moment, I know that Conduit, still treats it like a, a, a self-custody solution where Fed, either up, eventually, when they also run, on these types of federations, w-are planning to do this sort of socialized backup where you can, where you can to some extent trust the guardians to help you regain access should you make some fatal mistake. And it's, it's, so it's also a slightly different comparison in that sense, where in some communities, you're always gonna want to have these uncle Jim models because you're on, you're onboarding people who you can't necessarily ever really expect to take self-custody. But at the same time, you know, you, you want to give them something that's better than a fully custodial solution." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "15:34", "start": 934.0, "text": "So, talk to us a little bit on the operator side of this house. What does it take for an operator, in terms of their competence and their level of ability to be a guardian, let's say?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "15:45", "start": 945.0, "text": "I mean, very little. I mean, you, you have to, you have to pay attention, like you can't-- The idea is that you switch it on and you leave it, and as, as long as the machine or the, the Start9 device is, is, is powered on and it has, has access to the internet, then, then it should run automatically, and it does for the, for the most part, but, There, there is a little bit of, there is a little bit of maintenance involved, but you really need very, very little technical expertise. Like that, that's, that's been the most amazing, part of this experience. There's, I mean, there's, there's myself and six other people and At least two or three out of those seven people are completely non-technical, like, I mean, entirely, entirely non-technical. and, and even so, it's, it's, it's simple enough, and it's going to get even simpler, as time goes by. It's going to become easier. the setup is the most difficult part because all you really need to do is exchange sort of guardian codes amongst the group of people. but other than that, it's a- Straightforward click, click, click, click, process after you've got your Start9 device and you have it up and running. Obviously, I have to sync, sync, a Bitcoin Core node, and, and that process takes a while, but that's also not, not very, not very technical. I think the first, the first iteration of the federation, there was a slightly, slightly more technical hiccups involved, there were one or two bugs that had to be sorted out, but the second time we did it, it was super smooth Smooth and very easy, and I'm, I'm pretty confident that just about anybody could do this, like, like really." }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "17:27", "start": 1047.0, "text": "And so if you run it on Start9, everything is graphical. Yeah, if you run it on Start9, everything is graphical. It's a one-click install, and then you're in our UI, and there's, so there's no like CLI involved whatsoever. Yeah. And, we exchanged a few setup codes over like Signal or some other messenger, and then we run a startup procedure, and you're good to go. Yeah, afterwards there's little to do." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "17:53", "start": 1073.0, "text": "Yeah, and then what about, so out of the seven, so in this model you currently have it as a seven guardians, is it like a five of seven multisig under the hood? So as an example, let's say that means you can have up to two of those guardians temporarily offline and the other five can still sign, is that how it works? Or talk us through that?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "18:11", "start": 1091.0, "text": "Exactly, exactly. That's exactly how it works. So two can go offline, the entire system, Just, just continues to work, you know. That is also, like running on Start9 is only possible because of that property, because of being federated, because- This, the system is supposed to custody serious amounts of funds in there, but the individual hardware is like not that reliable and if you have it at home, it could get, You know, it could break, the house could burn down, like just a hardware failure. so the Fedimint project takes on a huge amount of complexity to provide these like federated systems, so you have like automatic, like at least five out of seven data replication for any transaction that you make. You don't notice it as a user because it only takes us a few hundred milliseconds to replicate the transaction to all the machines. but, you know, that is, that is done every time a trans- Transaction is made, and that is the only, only reason like this is even workable, like running any si- any serious, service on the Start9 that like custody funds, wouldn't be possible without being federated, and also the, Smaller thing, but also quite important is the uptime. So while the individual guardians on residential internet might only have like a ninety-five percent uptime, maybe ninety-eight percent, if it's good, this is not high enough for like a payment service where you really go for like far beyond ninety-nine percent reliability, but if two of them can go down and they are somewhat- Geographically distributed, so if one of them loses power or internet, the others don't all do the same, then you get far better, uptime and you come into that like ninety-nine point five or higher percent range, where you, I think, need to be for people to get so comfortable with your service that it's like their primary, the primary wallet, you know, you wanna, you, you need to be like reliable enough that it becomes a habit to just use, the Fedimint for everything, really. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a question on the on-chain aspect" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:25", "start": 1225.0, "text": "of it then. So let's say the user of this, Fedimint, they might be using a Conduit wallet, they want to receive on-chain. So actually, when they show, you know, they show an address to their counterparty, is that actually like a multi-sig address controlled by the federation? Is that, yeah, actually what's going on under the hood? So it just looks like a QR, but it's actually a Bitcoin multi-sig address they're receiving to?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "20:46", "start": 1246.0, "text": "Yeah, well Like actually spend later, people can't tell, but it's a five out of seven multi-seq. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "20:57", "start": 1257.0, "text": "Gotcha. And then, how do you do the balance between how much on-chain and how much of it is held in Lightning?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "21:03", "start": 1263.0, "text": "the gateway does it automatically, so or like the, the gateway operator does it. so, running a gateway is, quite a bit more involved, than running a federation, like because on the one hand, you need to manage the liquidity in your Lightning node, and then the-- on the other hand, you manage the liquidity inside the federation that you're connected to or multiple federations. So it's a, end-to-end model. You can have multiple federations connected to one, the same gateway, and multiple gateways connected to the same- Federation, so we amortize the liquidity costs of the lightning nodes and the time investment of ra- like managing the liquidity in the nodes across multiple, federation. So Fedimint right now, we run a gateway service we use to like bootstrap new federation, new federations such as Hermans. There's maybe like a dozen or maybe twenty federations connected to them, all running against the same Lightning node and eventually if we have, if we have enough federations in the region or Hermann's federation is large enough to warrant like a like the investment of running their own gateway, they will spin up a new one, they will add it in the Guardian dashboard, and then the clients will automatically pick it up and start, you know, use their own gateway to route, and eventually they can remove our, our gateway service from it, and then, yeah, continue completely independently. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "22:34", "start": 1354.0, "text": "So just again, taking a step back from listeners, making sure everyone can follow along. So let's say you're an individual user, you just, you know, you just download this app, you can earn and spend, and On-chain and Lightning, they're quote-unquote just work. If you are a guardian, you are, let's say, one of the seven in this example, one of the seven who is running a Start9 or an Umbral type device, and you, you're running basically an app on that device that kind of helps manage the on-chain wallet for this federation and kind of helps the experience for those end users. And then another role is the Lightning gateway. So the Lightning gateway is connecting with the federation, and he- Can be, you know, he can serve multiple federations, and this lightning gateway, I mean, it-- that can be a business model, right? Because he might be routing and earning money on that. Of course, he has costs to pay too, but there's a profitable business model for people out there who wanna be a lightning gateway, so they might be doing that, routing and, helping ensure good connectivity, a good, you know, inbound liquidity, all those normal things, and uptime, obviously. And then, I guess, that lightning gateway has to maintain a balance of eCash tokens Have some level of trust in the federation, because he doesn't want to get rugged on that side, but obviously on the lightning side, he's managing his channels to make sure that there's a good experience for the federation." }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "23:54", "start": 1434.0, "text": "Exactly. And yeah, so the, the gateway is an, is an economical actor, like in opposition to the, to the guardians, because the gateway does have real costs, but being so close to the actual economic activity, this might end up relatively profitable. I don't see it as like, Because also the time investment, it is there and you need to have a certain understanding there, but you can run a gateway in a few hours a month, so relative to that, it might be a relatively profitable endeavor as a hobby or something. I" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "24:28", "start": 1468.0, "text": "see. And so I guess what is the hope then going forward? Are you obviously hoping that more federations could spawn up and you would see more people following this model? Yeah, we" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "24:38", "start": 1478.0, "text": "already, yeah, already in the process of, sourcing new federations in the same region. one in Mozambique, for example, like another two or so in South Africa, yeah. It's like, it's Fedimint are a bit of a more advanced tool, they only really make sense if you have a like active circular economy. I think we have two user types where it really pays off. Like if you just have twenty dollars, thirty dollars, small amounts just to get, you know, started, I think Blink and Wallet and Satoshi and so forth can be fine, but where like the Fedimint use case really shines is, for two kinds of people, the one that have a- Already on-chain funds and they wanna now make them liquid and spend them privately, yeah, and, that, that is a like common case where you have a Fedimint wallet and a hardware wallet, and that's your combination. Basically then you have all your needs met as a, as an individual, or the other side of which, is that you are like a small business owner, so you have a kind of the opposite where you have a lot of lightning coming in and it accrues over time, and then eventually you move it on chain. we provide, we provide point of sale solutions as well, That like very similar. And is that in the" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "26:03", "start": 1563.0, "text": "Conduit wallet you're referring to there? Yes." }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "26:04", "start": 1564.0, "text": "Yeah, yeah. So in the Conduit wallet, there's, there's a link there, you just tap it, it brings you to like a, a web app, looks like a Blink point of sale, basically works just the same, the funds go directly into your wallet as eCash. and then that, that's why also the, the, the federated aspect is so important because, the idea is that people can use federations to save up significant amount Money like to them personally significant, maybe like a year's worth of savings, and then move that on chain to stay economical even in an environment where like a transaction is like a hundred dollars or something, you know, like a Bitcoin on chain transaction, which we might, hopefully, might see again. Or which we have to see again at some point for, the security model to work. So, that's where it was really, really designed for. It's like, it takes a long term view and builds like a piece of infrastructure around it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "27:05", "start": 1625.0, "text": "Yeah. See. And so you see it as, yeah, so I guess this is this concept of community custody that you're talking about, this idea that there'll be a lot of people who are either not capable or not willing to properly self-custody everything themselves, and that's where you see- The real, the value then for these users, the Fedimint, Fedimint users. Exactly. Okay. So I guess as I'm reading it then, well, actually, you guys tell me, what do you see as the key wins for users to do this? Is it the privacy? Is it the convenience? Is it just ease of use? What is it?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "27:41", "start": 1661.0, "text": "All" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "27:42", "start": 1662.0, "text": "of the above, I think." }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "27:43", "start": 1663.0, "text": "I think all of the above, but, but most of all, I think I mean, I kind of, I kind of, mentioned this earlier, but Most of all, I think it's the fact that you literally have zero fees transacting between people within the same federation. It's literally like passing, I mean, because if you, if you think about a local, local small village, which is where these kind of, these kind of circular economies typically, typically start in these sort of small locations where a lot of the, a lot of the economic activity is very local, You're gonna have most people on the same federation, and it's literally like passing physical cash around. There's no, there's no transaction fee involved in passing a note from one person to another, and this is the kind of experience that you have paying from, from one user to another. and I think the, I think the fees really are a big consideration, because a lot of-- I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of the custodial, Bitcoin wallets have lately, upped their fees. It has become more expensive to transact, with some of these, some of these wallets, whereas when, when it's, you know, a couple of years ago, two, three years ago, you could literally get away with making transactions at zero cost, a lot of these costs have been pushed up, and I don't know if this is because the wallet, wallets realized that they've got to start making money one way or another? and so they've pushed up transaction fees, and so by far the most positive feedback I've gotten so far is the fact that people are, people are genuinely impressed by the fact that they can now send SATs around between one another again, and the fees are literally, literally zero. but then obviously also the privacy. I think the privacy is a, is, is a, is a big win for more, more sophisticated users, people who have, have that concern because they've, they've thought that far, but people you typically onboard as a first time user, not necessarily Necessarily thinking about privacy." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "29:39", "start": 1779.0, "text": "Interesting. So as I read you then, it sounds like on the end user level, it's convenient and cheap fees and maybe some privacy. On the lightning gateway side, he might eventually become like a profitable lightning node out of this, so he can make money out of it. I can see the incentive there. What about the incentive for the guardian? Because the guardian has to run, you know, a Start9, he has to make sure it's, you know, still going. What's the, what do you see as the incentive for guardians to scale?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "30:04", "start": 1804.0, "text": "I mean, I think the incentive there is, I want to onboard people within my community, I want to give them an easy way to use Bitcoin, but at the same time I want to do it in a way which I know is practical. but also with an acceptable security trade-off. There, there's always going to be some trade-off involved with onboarding, an entirely new person. you know, maybe you only have ten minutes of their time. And in ten minutes' time, you can only explain so much. And so this whole conversation of, okay, well, let's download this wallet, but by the way, be careful because, blah, blah, blah, you know, this is-- you shouldn't trust it with big amounts, blah, blah. It, it, it kind of feels like that conversation has become a lot easier. My, my incentive is to onboard people with a clear conscience. I think that's, that's why I, I want to do this." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "30:58", "start": 1858.0, "text": "Interesting. And so, do you see it as an easier onboarding experience then?" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "31:03", "start": 1863.0, "text": "It's, it's as easy as a custodial Lightning wallet, but it's, it's got a more acceptable security model. I'd rather, I'd rather somebody trust five or six other people in addition to myself, all of whom I know, rather than some anonymous, or not anonymous, but, but some far removed entity that operates in a different country, that, you know, I, I don't know when that, when that service stops running. That's just a more acceptable security model. and I, like I said earlier, I think, I think the- I think the, the backup solutions with these type of federated models are gonna become more interesting. Like, there's gonna be more interesting ways in which you could regain access to your funds should you make a catastrophic mistake, whereas, you know, with full self custody, that catastrophic mistake can really be the end of it." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "31:56", "start": 1916.0, "text": "Josh, on the Fedimint protocol side of the house, what do you see coming, down the pipeline there?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "32:02", "start": 1922.0, "text": "coming out of pipeline, besides the Iro stuff, Herman, they are also running a few other novelties in, inside their new federation, They're the first one to run entirely on a new generation of modules, you know, which improve reliability and UX in a few key areas. they are so far like in beta, so Herman is the first to, to run them, but, soon they're gonna be, become standard and supported, Buy all the, all the major, Fedimint wallets out there. Yeah. Not to talk about that too much though, you know, we prefer to talk about things we already did. yeah, but you're gonna hear more about this over the next, next couple of months, probably already with the next release." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "32:55", "start": 1975.0, "text": "Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting the point you make. you got, like, sorry, go on. Yep." }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "32:58", "start": 1978.0, "text": "Yeah, and, I mean, the, the, the Fedimint project, I, I would put like this, the Fedimint project has, has come quite a long way in over the last like three years. It now works, basically we have a ship of fishes situation going on there, like all major parts have been rewritten with the new like V2 modules, and, you know, IRL was a complete rework basically of how we do networking as well. so the project has changed a lot, but I think now- So, with what Helman is running is in a lot of ways, in its final form, and, yeah, has all the, has all the rough edges removed really that has plagued us, plagued us for years. Yeah. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "33:46", "start": 2026.0, "text": "Yeah. I mean, I think it's an interesting space, and it's just what, what's happened over the years is there's been such a rapid evolution and shifting in these different models, like- A few years ago, like Ark and Spark weren't around, there weren't as many people using Liquid, and now, you know, Fedimint is also improving in, in the way that you can use it or in the way that, like, a guardian can more easily apply it and use it and run it himself. So I guess there's all-- there's continual evolution in the model. so yeah, I guess any closing thoughts, anything else you wanna, I guess, tips for--" }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "34:17", "start": 2057.0, "text": "I mean, I, I think first of all, I would say, you know, you, you should have people run their own lightning nodes, in a fully self-sovereign way for everyday payments, but at the same time, there should be other ways with different, different trade-offs, so we, we, we need a lot of options, you know, Liquid, Lightning, Ark, all of those, and, and Fedimint is one of those. It's gonna be a very interesting part of the puzzle going forward. I think, my, my initial thinking around the federation was to, was to and the way we've done it is a little different. We've, we've, we've deployed the guardians amongst several different circular economy projects. So we've, we've got quite a few of those in this part of the country in South Africa, and we've kind of distributed the guardians amongst, different circular economy projects. I think that was a better call, because at the, at the end of the day, I could see that, and this might sound like, like a bit of a- a stupid concern, but, but internet outages, electricity outages, these things happen, and if you put all these guardians in one, in one sort of very, you know, close proximity geographic location, if we have a power cut in our town, all seven guardians go down at the same time, and, and so having them distributed, but not too widely distributed, is probably the way, the way to go. I wouldn't, I wouldn't necessarily put them too close together, I think distributing them across a province or a regional area is probably a better idea, than maybe putting them all in one small village. that m-my sort of my thinking sort of changed around that. my assumption would have been we do it, you know, very, very closely connected to each other, but, but it's been better not to do it that way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:07", "start": 2167.0, "text": "Josha, any final tips or thoughts from you?" }, { "speaker": "hermann", "time": "36:11", "start": 2171.0, "text": "no, just to, just to reiterate that, the project has changed a lot over the last three years, so if you had experience with that before, or looked into it maybe a year or two years ago, you know, it definitely warrants another look. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:28", "start": 2188.0, "text": "Excellent. Alright, well, I'll leave the links in the show notes of bitcoinecashy dot org, fedimint dot org, and the Conduit wallet, I'll put the link there also. that's it. Thanks guys. Thanks for joining me." }, { "speaker": "joshi", "time": "36:39", "start": 2199.0, "text": "Awesome, thanks. Okay." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "36:41", "start": 2201.0, "text": "Take care. Cheers." } ] }