Nick, welcome to Presidio Bitcoin.
Thanks for having me. It's really nice here. It's crazy, honestly.
Yes, and thank you so much for hopping on the 21 and 21 podcast. I'm so happy that I could have you on the show.
I'm excited. It's been a long time coming.
Yes, it has been. For those of you that don't know Nick Slaney, he's a longtime Bitcoiner dedicated to making Bitcoin work as money.
He helped build C equals at Block, where the LDK node became one of the Lightning Network's largest and most active.
Before that at Block, he worked on the BitKey team and helped get the wallet from concept to prototype.
And now he's launching a new startup, MoneyDevKit.
And now he's here and he's about to get grilled by me.
Yeah. Bring it. Let's go.
Let's go. All right. I'm starting my clock.
We're going to do 21 minutes.
My first question for you is what brings you to Presidio Bitcoin today?
I'm here to... Yesterday I talked for the Bitcoin design event and we talked about stablecoins versus Bitcoin and I was the home team. I defended Bitcoin for payments for the future.
Represented. Yeah, so we're having a big Bitcoin design week at Presidio Bitcoin this week and I was so excited that you could make it. What kind of like made you want to come to this not being like a designer as well?
I said a bit in my talk, I've worked a lot with designers.
I'm really passionate about good design for Bitcoin.
And, you know, I love helping out wherever I can, especially when it comes to Bitcoin versus stable coins.
I think it's something that we don't really talk about enough.
And it's something I've thought about and honestly debated people about a lot.
Yeah. What are your kind of like high level thoughts on on the matter?
I know you're team Bitcoin, but also pro stable coin.
yeah i think stable coins have a purpose i think there's a lot of news and a lot of hype around
stable coins right now and maybe some people might look at that and think that you know depending on
bitcoin versus stable coins maybe the battle is already won but i think it's just beginning
and there aren't a lot of people using either for payments yet so i think it's worth going for what
we think is the best option.
I agree.
Yes, us on the Spiral team
are also very excited about
kind of promoting this narrative
as Bitcoin is money
since the store of value concept
is already kind of very popular,
proven out.
And I know that you are passionate
about this as well.
Yeah.
Worked on a lot of products
that have kind of helped
promote the Bitcoin is money
value proposition.
So you used to be a block,
which is where I work on the Spiral team.
You're on several different teams at Block.
So one of them being BitKey, being early on at that team.
I would love to know how you were thinking about designing a Bitcoin wallet
that's both secure and usable for everyday people.
I think the coolest thing about the BitKey team was it really was focused on
getting to everyday normal people.
And that's a lot of what my work is focused on, just making it so that people can use Bitcoin without really thinking about Bitcoin so much.
So, yeah, there's a lot of technical details behind BitKey that make it so that you don't really have to worry about the things that most Bitcoiners worry about.
Key is a cool product.
And then the other team that you're on is SQLs.
and that is a Lightning node.
And one thing that C equals has done
is really kind of help define this kind of LSP spec.
Why is that important?
And can you kind of explain kind of what this LSP concept is?
The LSP lighting service provider
was something that was thought up by Roy at Breeze.
It's basically a way to get Lightning liquidity
to someone who needs it.
And very early on when people were making Lightning wallets, this kind of idea of liquidity was something that was pretty hard to deal with, think about.
And LSPs just make that really simple.
The end result for users is that you can just open up a wallet and use Lightning.
So we spent a lot of time on the LSP spec to make sure we could get the experience we wanted in the end.
For people who maybe don't know a ton about the Lightning Network, why is it important and what do these LSPs set out to solve?
LSPs solve the inbound liquidity problem, which is something that people talk about a lot with Lightning.
With payment channels, you need to bring Bitcoin to the channel.
And if someone is new to the Bitcoin ecosystem, they might not necessarily have Bitcoin to put on chain to dedicate to a Lightning channel.
So LSPs are really there to make sure and bring Bitcoin liquidity to people who need it without them having to worry about, hey, I need to buy some Bitcoin to receive this payment or something like that.
So Lightning is really kind of out to solve this, like, you know, Bitcoin's mission of being a medium exchange to make it faster, cheaper, more scalable.
Do you think that Lightning is kind of doing what it's been set out to do or it's still early on in this development?
That a good question There a lot of rhetoric especially in the last few years there was a lot of talk about Lightning Has it succeeded Has it failed Lightning is supposed to be the way that we scale up Bitcoin
And I think it's succeeded in a lot of respects. At Block, we saw a lot of success with
Lightning payment volume with Cash App and people actually using Lightning.
The kind of tricky points around Lightning are self-custody and the things that LSPs try to solve.
I think we've actually gotten to a point now with certain SDKs, a lot of Lightning has been abstracted away in a really easy way to do it.
And what we're doing actually with Money Dev Kit is taking what we've done so far, which has gotten to just about an easy Lightning payment experience, and bringing that up to what people expect out of payments, kind of that next level API that people are used to using, like with Stripe and stuff like that.
yes i haven't even asked you about money dev kit which is your new startup yeah have you launched
a startup before or is this your first time this is my first real startup i think uh you could make
the argument of what we talked about a lot block was sequels was kind of a little startup at block
but this is the first time really doing it and being you know a poor startup founder trying to
make it happen no like corporate you can't like you know have the nice parts of being like at
Spiral, it's nice to be part of block where, you know, have access to like HR, like, you know, like legal stuff like that that you don't have to worry about.
Now you have to kind of.
Yeah, now we have to do it all ourselves.
It's exciting.
It's a good challenge.
Yeah.
So can you maybe tell our listeners a little bit about Money Dev Kit, like really in kind of layman's terms and what kind of inspired you to like block and do something different?
Yeah.
Very simply, Money Dev Kit is Stripe for Bitcoin payments.
And the way we're using Bitcoin, I think it's actually probably a more global and higher access Stripe.
It's really the focus of MoneyDevKit is on creating Stripe for developers and giving access to payments that developers expect.
Because I mentioned before that we've done a lot of work to get to Bitcoin payments and to get to Lightning payments and to do all of the stuff within that stack to make it easy to get there.
But what we haven't done yet is gone from the send and receive kind of very simple wallet functionality to products, checkouts, admin pages, all the things you expect when you're using something like Stripe.
So Money Dev Kit delivers that.
A few lines of code, you can have lightning payments right there in your app, kind of wherever you want them.
And that's what Stripe did for credit card payments.
I think it's something new for Bitcoin payments.
So you're really just focused on like kind of the e-com marketplace.
Ecom, developers, people running SaaS, stuff like that.
And the way we've actually packaged LDK, it's really easy to take that stack and put it in a bunch of different places.
Like what are people doing right now without MoneyDevKit?
Without MoneyDevKit, you have two options.
And this is really the key insight for MoneyDevKit.
You either can use a custodial service.
I think OpenNode was probably the biggest one that let you take Lightning Payments easy.
or you can use something like a BTC pay server.
You could go breeze SDK or something like that.
And the kind of issue there is OpenNode was a really good product,
but they were custodial and they had the same limitations
that many traditional finance products have today.
So very easy to start,
but people who are really looking for access to the financial system,
they were kind of kept out in the same way.
Those people really pushed to things like BTC pay server
and certain SDKs that are a lot harder to set up.
And MoneyDevKit basically makes it
so you can literally just use a few lines of code,
get a lightning checkout, receive lightning payments.
And that's, I think, actually a higher access story
than what OpenNote ever was.
So if I am running a business online
and I want to accept Bitcoin payments,
I can just easily come back and add it to the website?
Yeah, with the beauty of AI now, you could just say, hey, add Lightning Payments to my website if you're using something like Cursor.
And it would put in a few lines of code, sign up at the website, and you'd be there.
It's easier than Stripe, honestly.
Because you'd have to go through the onboarding or anything like that.
Fab coding has come a long way.
It seems like you're kind of optimizing for that, maybe?
Yeah, I mean, making a really easy-to-use library means that agents can use it really easily.
And the fact that you don't have to install a different server or pay monthly fees or anything like that means it really is something where you can just add it to whatever you're working on very quickly.
Then are you also building a wallet or like where will like my payments go once I accept them?
It's self-custody.
So the payments go to your node.
What you'll see is an admin page and the keys are actually held within your own infrastructure.
but yeah you can send off to a wallet it's not necessarily made to be a place where you keep
your bitcoin it's more a place to receive payments and then you can either send to exchange after or
you can send to your own personal wallet but yeah i mean you could imagine in the future
being able to spin up and use nodes really quickly maybe there could be a wallet someday
okay so the merchant also has to kind of do something on their side to like set up a node
They wouldn have to set up a node necessarily I think you know the few lines of code gets you a node You don actually ever see that What a merchant would do on their end is they would decide okay I have Bitcoin now What do I do with it Do I want to put in long cold storage or do I want to off ramp to an exchange and get local currency So we make that easy I see Well that really cool I excited about that and you
have to keep us posted on your progress. Yeah. I'm excited to show you guys.
Yeah. Do you have like a demo yet or? Yes, we have a demo. We're working on making it,
We're packaging it now so you can literally do, I think the dream demo for this is me.
I'm not a developer, just vibe coding an app and taking lightning payments.
And that's something that we've done.
It's just we have some finishing touches just to get it all published and stuff.
You have a website that people should, or Twitter handle that people should follow for MoneyDevKit?
Yeah, MoneyDevKit.com.
And the Twitter handle is Money underscore Dev underscore Kit.
Okay, well, everyone can follow along with your really cool project.
shifting to potentially non-Bitcoin topic,
can be Bitcoin, whatever you want.
What's the last book or article that you read
that blew your mind?
Oh, well, I've been doing a lot of research
for this talk I did.
And during it, during the research phase,
Matt was sending me some things.
And I actually, I stumbled upon Mark Goodwin's Bitcoin dollar.
And I did a bunch of research into that.
It's a very interesting thesis on stable coins and Bitcoin and how they interact.
It's honestly, it could take a lot more than 20 minutes to talk about, but it's very interesting.
And it's fun to see how some of it plays out and some of it doesn't.
I'll have to check it out.
Another maybe non-Bitcoin question.
So a little bit of like AI vibe coding.
Have you vibe coded anything cool?
Cool. Have I vibe coded anything cool? I vibe coded my personal website, which NickSelaney.com, you can go look at it. It was a few months ago, so I feel like the state of vibe coding changes so fast. I could probably do better now.
and for money dev kit the very beginning i did vibe code a decent amount around uh ldk node
um i had a partner join and help fix everything but uh it's crazy what you can do especially um
with ldk honestly um you can make a whole lightning out of implementation if you want
i did see your website and i was wondering if you vibe coded it and i did like the structure it was
very it kind of looks like it though it's straight to the point but like it definitely gets the point
so i actually need i started building a website for myself and i'm finished so you've inspired me
to finish yeah it's cool to do it's very instructive too because uh you it'll make the
website i'll say hey do you want to throw us on versell and uh that's pretty easy too and the flow
for adding money dev kit to that is also very easy so if you wanted to sell something i recently
made soaps at home i was like oh i should sell these soaps soaps yeah oh you make soaps
Well, yeah, it's not like a, you know, I got like a bunch of beef tallow and wanted to give it a try.
Beef tallow soap?
Yeah.
So not like my first, not like a thing I do often, but I don't know.
Kind of get into that sort of thing every once in a while.
This is like combining like Bitcoiner plus like...
Yeah, Bitcoiner.
Yeah, like grass-fed beef and yeah, like homesteading.
It's a whole thing, so...
Okay.
Well, I guess I've never heard of that, but that's very fun that you're doing that.
um what is your most controversial bitcoin opinion
we have to get a little spicy on the show
let me think um oh man or any spicy hot takes i think my maybe my spiciest that is laying out
and you know it's becoming a company now is that we're not there yet in terms of usability for
people who actually need Bitcoin. We've seen a lot of services that provide Bitcoin and get people on
Bitcoin. But for people who actually don't have access to the financial system, it's still really
difficult for them to use these things natively. It's really easy for us as Bitcoiners to say,
oh, you just spin up a wallet, you run a node. But to actually get someone using Bitcoin the way
it's sort of meant to be used is not there yet.
And I guess I liken it to Linux.
Everyone talks about, or everyone did talk about,
the year of desktop Linux.
And that was never going to happen.
No one ever actually uses desktop Linux,
except maybe me, probably.
But once we got Android phones,
everyone was actually using Linux.
There's actually millions, if not billions of people
use Linux now, and they have no idea.
And I think that moment still hasn't happened for Bitcoin yet.
But with things like MoneyDevKit, I think we can get there.
Besides MoneyDevKit, which you're working on, are there any dream projects that you have that you would love to see somebody else build?
Yeah, I have a lot of dreams.
I would love to build them myself, honestly.
But in that vein, it's all of those products that really harness Bitcoin for what it is and really give true access.
And it's really hard to do.
It was a lot of stuff we talked about at Block and never got to quite do.
I would do it all myself honestly okay well if you could inspire somebody else to build something because can you inspire yeah what would be hmm what is like a dream project for hmm the biggest things I think about now are policy wise actually The stuff with the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act
We talked about maybe a sort of de minimis exception for custody.
Those are the kind of things that I think can push Bitcoin UX actually a long way.
So right now you see a lot of people who are designing around the fact that you can't self-custody a very small amount of money.
And I think it's time we call it what it is. Not necessarily something you can develop and build, more something you have to push through policy. But that's a dream of mine that I'm not sure if I can pull it off.
Yeah, Paul, I did see that you are very interested on the policy side too, which is super important in the Bitcoin space. There's still like a ton of work that needs to be done.
Yeah, it was something, you know, being at Block and the stuff we talked about is very, got to go really deep on that stuff and see, you know, where the edges are.
Are there ways that you think that Bitcoiners can help out on the policy side or what should they be paying attention to?
Yeah, it's honestly like the kind of stuff you hear all the time, talking to your congresspeople and getting involved locally.
I was involved at the state level for digital assets and cryptocurrencies in New Hampshire.
it's really just talking to people and educating as much as you can.
Well,
that's,
I hope that people get out there and,
and do that.
But yeah,
I'm switching gears.
So there's a lot of talk of sats versus Bitcoin.
Oh yeah,
there is.
Maybe this was a sore subject.
How do you think that we should think about how we display these,
these fractions of Bitcoin? And is this conversation important to you?
I think it's a good conversation to have. And I think I agree with the premise that
no one knows how to, no one knows what stats are right now outside of Bitcoin.
So taking the opportunity to pick something that could make more sense feels right. I think
it's interesting to talk about, but we need to make the app that everyone
uses and starts thinking in Bitcoin terms.
Whoever makes that is going to be able to decide whether it's
sats or bits or Bitcoins or whatever.
You have an opportunity with my dev kit.
Who knows?
What will I pick?
Will it be bits?
Ooh.
Yeah.
Might be bits.
Your team bits?
I am a bits believer.
So yeah, a bits guy.
But yeah, I mean, whatever.
If people, if normal people are talking about Bitcoin
in whatever terms I'm for it.
Okay, well, we'll have to see what you end up going with.
You can influence the ecosystem here.
Yeah.
A few more questions.
So kind of what's happening today
that's giving you a lot of hope for Bitcoin's future?
The policy side, things kind of changing there.
I think 2024 was a dark time for Lightning especially.
And seeing things turn around and be more permissive,
it's given me enough courage to start a company.
Well, that's great to hear.
Which builder or thinker has influenced you the most
in how you approach Bitcoin?
It's funny, whenever I think about something new
or something cool,
it's always something that Ben Ark has done.
He's a guy, he's kind of,
you have to kind of search to find him,
but he was the first person to do a lightning POS and a first person to do all these sorts of things.
He was early on Noster.
He made Ellen bits.
Low key.
He's like always at the future of things.
Someone who I,
I always find when I'm thinking,
Oh,
this is a new thing.
No one's thought of.
Oh wait,
he did it.
Great to have these types of people.
Yep.
Last question.
what advice would you give to people who are either new to the bitcoin space or thinking about
jumping in do it jump in i think the most surprising thing what really sent me on my bitcoin
working in bitcoin journey was just sending messages to people who i never thought would
respond like mackerel or steve lee um and then they did and they were actually super friendly
and welcoming. And I think actually Spiral is a really good example of this. You hop on the LDK
Discord, you can talk to people who you never
thought would give you the time of day. Everyone's super friendly and
it's worth jumping in and seeing where you can help out.
Well, second thought that people on the Spiral team are very
like to answer and are usually pretty quick. But I would say that, yeah,
it's definitely like you just got to kind of reach out, not be afraid to. And
someone will probably reply.
If not, move on to the next person.
I feel like it's one of the most
hidden secrets of
just getting into the space is you
can just message someone and they're probably
going to respond, which is crazy.
It's crazy.
Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.
We've mentioned a few
links and places, but generally
if people wanted to follow you
or reach out to you, where should they go?
What should they do?
Yeah, Nick's Lady on X.
And yeah, mindefficate.com is a startup.
But yeah.
Cool.
Well, thanks again.
And hope you enjoy the rest of your time in San Francisco.
Thanks, Haley.
Yeah.