Conor thanks so much for making it on the show today thanks for having me of course uh for those
of you that don't know Conor he is also on the Spiral team and we work very closely together
he's a product manager and he oversees the Spiral grant program where we give grants out to
open source bitcoin designers and developers and he also had a very unique path to bitcoin
starting off as a footballer in the UK yeah is that where we're going yeah straight into the
football stuff um but yeah okay so yeah I'm kind of thanks for having me Hayley um I see you putting
in a lot of good work on your podcast you've had a lot of good guests and stuff so I really enjoy
enjoy this so good to be on here um yeah you could say I had a unique path into technology
generally so like my first job my first career was a was a professional footballer so that was my
that was my day-to-day that's how I earned my living I played for West Ham United Football
Club from the age of eight years old all the way up till I was 18 or 19 then I played for a few
clubs in some of the lower divisions in the English football pyramid and then for various reasons
stopped playing football around my early 20s maybe 23 or so went to university studied computer
science and then the kind of rest was history you know i went into software engineering from there
and then found my way into bitcoin really so um yeah god gave me a second chance at another career
so i'm quite thankful to be honest well we're thankful that you found us and uh yeah thanks
for the intro yeah so i'm gonna hit you some questions all right let's go rapid fire let's go
well first off going off your unique path so maybe tell our listeners a little bit how you
started off as a Sproul grantee and now you're managing that program and kind of what that
was like and how you got there. Yeah it's interesting so I think it was like 2017 I
discovered Bitcoin like that bull market and it was me working at a company as a software engineer
one of my colleagues mentioned it and it was primarily from an investment kind of perspective
but I think because I had the technology background it was kind of okay let's use what I've learned
in tech to kind of understand some of the fundamentals of what Bitcoin's all about.
And, you know, like most people, you go down the rabbit hole, you learn a lot about it.
And then studied it for a few years and wanted to find a way to contribute to this open source
thing. So, yeah, I started helping out in some design focused efforts around Bitcoin because
I found the UX to be quite difficult to use. And I thought there was a space for improvement
there so played played a role in trying to help kick off like the bitcoin design community
um and then yeah my manager steve reached out to me and said is this something that i'd want to
work on on a more full-time basis so yeah worked on design community efforts worked on some
developer libraries around key management also did a few educational efforts um with our with
our colleague and friend Matt Belez as well called Hello Bitcoin so it's been quite diverse
some of the stuff I've worked on and then when my grant finished which was a six-month grant to
work on Bitcoin full-time I was given opportunity to join the spiral team Square Crypto at the time
full-time and now I'm doing technical PMing roles trying to help out free open source Bitcoin
projects in various ways and also always on the lookout for talented people who want to contribute
to Bitcoin and basically just trying to help them on their journey to to to being a success in doing
that really. What's something that you look out for in grant applications? Yes a number of different
things I mean Spiral we have a set of kind of pillars or principles that we we we would like
to see people work on, you know, stuff that helps improve Bitcoin security, its privacy,
its scalability, and its UX as well. So work that is kind of focused on those areas. We always
encourage people to find room and space to just go and contribute and, you know, start doing the
work. There isn't a good thing about Bitcoin. It's not something that requires you to, you know,
submit a resume to a company or have or be credentialed in any in any way you can you know
your work really does speak for itself so you know people who have taken the initiative to find ways
to contribute in positive ways and um and of course a strong bitcoin ethos kind of understanding what
the value proposition of bitcoin is is important as well what would you say a common misconception
is about Bitcoin open source contributors.
Maybe something that the average person
maybe wouldn't know.
Yeah, I don't even know if the average person
knows that there are like real humans
behind building Bitcoin, to be honest.
Like, I mean, if I speak to my average,
you know, my friend,
I'm pretty sure they're unaware
of what free open source software is.
Pretty sure they're unaware
there are real human beings
behind maintaining the software.
adding new features, making Soret secure across multiple platforms.
A lot of work that is not very glamorous,
but it's what's got us to the point where we have
a $2.something trillion market cap worth of value in the ecosystem.
So yeah, I would say that more than anything.
I would say people kind of see this as quite a mysterious thing,
especially, you know, with like Satoshi and Satoshi disappearing and not being a part of the project for a long time now.
People I think they underestimate the real human beings doing the work on the front line to try and make this thing as accessible to as many people as possible really
So I would say that is a misconception about Bitcoin contributors.
Real humans, not AI?
Not yet.
I mean, there's different layers to it, right?
I don't see it being the case at the protocol level, at least,
that AI is going to play a huge role just yet.
Who knows in a few years?
But there's definitely room at the application layer
where there's a lot less arguably at stake for people to experiment with.
But yeah, I don't think we're at the point where we can just set the AI off
and to do its own thing and, you know, build out the future of Bitcoin.
But you never know.
You never know.
Yeah, real humans.
You got to come to Presidio Bitcoin.
You see the humans here.
You're here.
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, Presidio is lovely, by the way.
Yeah, it's like one of those offices you come to and it's like,
yeah, I want to do some work today.
It's kind of inspiring.
Obviously, the people here are also working on really cool projects
that are going to try and push the boundaries of what's possible in Bitcoin.
But yeah, just the whole area, just the whole vibe.
You guys have done a really good job.
I know you've played a big hand in that.
So yeah, it's good to see your growth and all of that stuff over the years
and been able to build something like this.
So kudos to you as well.
Thank you.
Maybe you'll move to San Francisco one day.
Maybe we'll Presidio Bitcoin pill you.
Yeah, maybe.
i'm not opposed to it i'm not opposed to it i've got i've got this on air yeah yeah i've got i've
got another half that's got to sign it off but um yeah i'm not i'm not opposed to it okay there's
potential yeah so you're obviously working on like a ton of cool projects which i know a lot
about what you're doing what's one thing that like you're particularly excited about right now
Besides the grant program.
Hmm.
What would I say I'm excited about?
Yeah, I mean, UX stuff is things I've been focused on quite a lot recently.
Stuff around payment protocols are always a bit hairy.
and trying to set a path that makes the everyday usage of Bitcoin easier
for everyday people is an area I spend some time on.
So things around human-readable addresses and payment protocols like Bolt12
that open up new use cases for people to be able to have this kind of static identifier
where they can use as like a contact in a wallet application
and be able to just center that on the fly without having to, you know,
do out-of-bound communication and send around these confusing,
long alphanumeric strings and stuff like that.
Just trying to see where stuff like that really fits in and where the use cases shine around that kind of stuff.
So Bolt12, human readable names, and trying to help developers understand the trade-offs of using these types of UX patterns
to ultimately onboard more people in a bit of an easier way.
So I would say I'm excited about that.
I worked on a little project called Easy Bitcoin Address, which is the kind of, I don't know, at this stage, maybe it's like the marketing term to represent these new form of Bitcoin addresses that you can easily share and get paid without some of the overhead of outbound communication and stuff.
So I'd say I'm quite excited about that or excited to at least see where it goes and see how the community adopts it.
There's been quite a few wallets and projects that have adopted it already and we expect that to grow.
So, yeah, we'll see. We'll see how that goes with people adopting easy Bitcoin addresses.
Yeah. So for those of you that maybe don't know about easy Bitcoin address,
it's kind of a way to make the user experience maybe more similar to something like, you know,
cash app where you have like a cash tag so you don't have to go in and type some like you know
technical thing behind the screen you can you know type in their cash tag like easy bitcoin
address you can generate kind of a easy name that you can then type in instead of typing out yeah so
like hayley at easy bitcoin address dot me or hayley at some wallet name dot me and that would
be what you'd share with me um as your payment identifier and then i can send you send you money
that way as opposed to if you've used bitcoin um you've used bitcoin or any bitcoin wallet then
you may have come across something like a lightning address or if not you'd be just using the raw
alphanumeric strings and it can be a bit scary there's this you know long string as if i get it
wrong if i change a letter if i change a number am i gonna send uh bitcoin into a black hole or
something so there's all of these well not really tiny but all of these experiences that can be
improved and still be secure but that's the that's the main thing yeah so you everyone should go test
it out i'll put the link in the description but you can go generate your own easy bitcoin address
exactly yeah besides easy bitcoin addresses which are of course great what do you like for
is like the next big innovation wave in bitcoin next big innovation wave um oh man that that a difficult one because we we get a unique uh seat seeing what
everyone's kind of working on and it's difficult to sometimes know how it's all gonna come together
um but there is a lot of stuff still happening on on the lightning front there's still um
a lot of room for growth and adoption in the lightning space it does require um
a level of infrastructure to still be built out to make the user experience around lightning
really strong especially for self-custodial users but we're getting there we're ever so close
um so over the next year six months i definitely think the ux around lightning for self-custodial
users is definitely going to be close to maybe what people were envisioning in the outset
but yeah beyond yeah beyond that what else is there yeah I mean our team is obviously very
focused on like lightning stuff so I think that's where we get a lot of insight and like a front row
to really see things explode.
But then there's also how that fits in with AI as well
and artificial intelligence and seeing the crossover
between Bitcoin and AI and what is AI going to choose?
What is AI going to choose as its preferred money?
Bitcoin has some flaws that may not make it suitable
for AI to do certain types of use cases,
But it definitely be interesting to see how Bitcoin and Lightning can be leveraged to in this new kind of AI world.
So I'm excited to see that.
And there are already companies and individuals and projects pushing the boundaries around that stuff.
So I think people should really keep a close eye on that space as well.
For people who don't know, why is something like Bitcoin important in AI?
is it just like to add a payment layer to ai is it to add a human interaction component like how
can bitcoin leverage ai um so i think it's more how can ai leverage bitcoin so ai is the way people
are using ai and ai agents is to interact with a number of different services so you know at this
point people are using their clawed code or their chat gpt or whatever it might be to
do a lot of the heavy lifting to build the applications but the agents still need access
to resources on the internet or yeah different types of resources and those those have to still
be paid for in some way and bitcoin gives you the advantage of being able to in the lightning
context transact quite frequently and do micro payments and stuff that is not um currently
possible in the fiat realm or even across the crypto system more broadly um so it just it just
opens up the possibilities with you know what's possible and what can be done autonomously um
with this type of money that is like and it's digitally native as well so agents can you know
have their own wallets manage their own balances do all of this thing all of this stuff in an
automated way um but you know like i said there are some trade-offs with using bitcoin in this way
you know what would the agents ai be able to use you know bitcoin in a high-fing environment what
would be their preferences around privacy
all of these different
things are stuff to consider
as well so I think it's still a
question that's up for debate what would be
that preferred currency
would they prefer like something that's a bit more
stable coins and stuff as well
so that
battle is
currently underway as far as I'm
concerned and we'll see
what comes out on top but as
builders in the space we have to try and you know push
the boundaries of
what is possible in that way and, you know, try and get Bitcoin ahead in that race, I think.
Maybe it would benefit Bitcoin if like we had more conversations with AI builders specifically
about their needs and how Bitcoin can fit uniquely and just more collaboration.
Yeah, I mean, you guys have done some good work around that.
You had some event here last month or two months ago, maybe like a hackathon,
like trying to get people to experiment with different types of software development kits
and libraries and seeing how that kind of integration might work so yeah people are
you know constantly trying to kind of push the boundaries there so yeah we'll see it's exciting
it's definitely exciting it could be like the explosion of adoption that bitcoin i don't know
if needs is the right word but you know it could happen and um yeah that that has that has interesting
implications for bitcoin if you know hundreds of thousands of ai agents are required or requesting
to use bitcoin what does that what does that mean for bitcoin in terms of scalability and all of
these different questions so we could see a huge huge spike in demand for bitcoin just in that in
that arena but it's still you know it's still speculative in that way and we don't know how
it's going to play out but it's definitely exciting area of experimentation i would say yeah we need
some ai builders to come here you're listening and you work in ai which i know there's a lot of
you in san francisco yeah come visit presidio bitcoin yeah we can learn from each other yeah
100 100 um well i have to ask you this because i feel like need to well you working on it plus We have Matt Pelez So there a lot of talk of sats versus Bitcoin and how we display quantities of Bitcoin
diffractions of Bitcoin.
What's your take on it?
Yeah, I was actually thinking about this on the way here, actually.
No, I really, it's really grown on me.
At first, you know, as someone who's been in Bitcoin space
for a few years, certain terminology, certain language,
certain way you use Bitcoin just becomes embedded in your psyche.
So the immediate response to anyone suggesting something
quite radically different can sometimes just cause a bit of friction
thinking in your mental model and the way you think about Bitcoin.
but it has grown on me
I think Sats is something known to a very small percentage of the world
and the Bitcoin brand is a very strong one
and we should leverage and build upon that
ultimately it's a proposal that is going to
organically be adopted by the market
and people are going to determine
what's best for their applications
and the use case they're trying to solve.
But the applications I have seen it in
where the idea of SATs is kind of deprecated,
the B symbol becomes more predominant
in the way you display integer-only balances for your Bitcoin
and the eight decimal place representation of Bitcoin disappears,
I think it's very positive.
I think most people that have seen the old style of displaying Bitcoin with the new
have pretty much been won over.
So now it's kind of just left down to the market
to kind of decide on if it's something
that they're going to adopt long term.
So yeah, I think if people want to read more about it,
I think John Kabbalah done a really great job
of initially creating the bit for it,
bit 177,
which I guess you can read the initial inspiration behind it.
And then Matt Belez has done a great job of
advocating for it and showing it in specific examples across applications.
So yeah,
like some of the people I'm going to share this with won't even know what
SaaS are,
you know?
So many Bitcoiners will say it's,
it's already embedded.
It's,
it's kind of a cultural thing,
language and stuff like that.
It's kind of a cultural thing.
But it's a,
I just love the fact that it's a proposal that is open to the market.
to decide whether they want to adopt it.
It's not a protocol change.
It's not something that requires consensus.
It's not something that requires a hard fork, a soft fork.
It's literally an experience.
It's a different way to experience Bitcoin
that we think is going to be more beneficial long-term.
I agree.
Well, we're going to get kicked out of this room very shortly for PBJ.
Peanut butter and jelly.
Can I get some more?
I'll just hit you with like one last question.
All right, all right.
Okay, okay.
For somebody that's maybe considering getting into the Bitcoin space,
either just learning about it more on the technical side,
maybe they're already an engineer,
or maybe they're a little further along the rabbit hole
and they want to like apply for a grant,
what's your like number one piece of advice?
um start contributing you don't need don't need permission to start contributing and being
of value to the bitcoin ecosystem there's lots of um valuable work that still needs to be done
a lot of maintenance a lot of testing a lot of design thinking a lot of privacy improvements
um the list the list goes on really so find what you're interested in find the area that you
are passionate about, find a way to start contributing.
And then once you're on that path, you can come and speak to people like me and the folks
at Spiral, and we'll try our best to support you and keep you on that journey, really.
Yes, you can speak to you.
You can come to some of our events over City of Bitcoin if you're in San Francisco.
Come to BitDevs, come to LitDevs, come to Builder, and then you can reach out to Connor.
where can they contact you at?
Anywhere really.
Anywhere.
Twitter.
Just shout out my name.
It can be on Twitter,
at Connor Ocus.
It can be on LinkedIn.
It can be on email,
Connor at spiral.xoz,
grants at spiral.xoz.
You know, just Google.
You'll find us.
You can ask AI or you can find Connor.
Yeah, exactly.
We're everywhere we need to be.
So yeah, and we're very approachable.
So if you need any advice, you need any help on getting started,
contributing to Bitcoin, we're more than happy to help.
Connor is definitely the chillest person on the Spiral team, I would say.
Yeah, I like to think I'm approachable, but I don't know.
Well, thanks for coming on the show.
And thanks for visiting San Francisco.
And we'll see you again soon for LitDevs and then the Bitcoin Design Week,
which we didn't even talk about,
but that's coming up.
That's coming up.
Looking forward to it.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
Bye.
See you.