Welcome in to This Week in Bitcoin, a special episode. I'm on the road.
My name is Chris, ChrisLAS.com, JupiterBroadcasting.com.
Well, before I left, I had a chance to sit down with someone who's proven them wrong every single
day. All the haters out there that say nobody uses Bitcoin for anything but hodling. You can't
use it for any day-to-day transactions. Well, this individual is proving them wrong every single day.
Oscar Mary is building the Fountain.fm podcast app, one of the favorites in the Bitcoin community.
But did you know Oscar was a Bitcoiner long before he became a podcast app developer?
I wanted to start just for the audience's sake with Bitcoin. I think that's where we should start
and if I recall you were a Bitcoiner long before you started working on the Fountain podcasting
app which obviously integrates Bitcoin. Yeah that's right. I feel very fortunate that I
discovered Bitcoin relatively early, quite accidentally, didn't understand it for many
many years but a friend of mine way back in the day who I saw as someone you know very intelligent
was just like telling me all about it and I was just like okay cool I'll you know just listen to
you and then yeah the kind of readers were you skeptical no honestly I I was I was I was very
young at the time and I just didn't even look into it at all but he just told me you know this is
going to be massive in the future you should you should buy some and so I just bought some and
forgot about it for for years after that and then maybe in like 2016 2017 kind of learned about in a
bit more detail became more interested in you know economics and things like that and read the book
the bitcoin standard which I think was transformative for a lot of people and that was when I kind of
you know realized oh wait I have some of this and let me go check on it you know that was it wasn't
like a crazy amount it wasn't like life-changing or anything like that but it was enough to make me
you know pay attention at that time and obviously the price going up but I think reading
the bitcoin standard in maybe 2016 2017 was when it clicked for me and also as for many people as
well, you know, seeing just the problems that Bitcoin solves in your everyday life, you know,
inflation, you know, I live in London, and the prices of everything are just skyrocketing. And
eventually, you do have to ask yourself the question, why are the prices for things double
what they were when I was a child. And so it was kind of the combination of those two things. But
yeah, I started learning about Bitcoin properly in maybe 2016, 2017, but never thought I would end
up working with the technology as we do now today with Fountain.
Wow, no kidding.
And so you, I'm sure now, know quite a bit about the Lightning Network.
Did you get into Lightning at all before Fountain, or was it in building Fountain that you needed
to learn the Lightning Network?
Yeah, so it was actually very accidental that all of this happened, and we started working
on Fountain in the sense of what it is today.
So the kind of backstory is I've always been really passionate and interested in audio as a medium. I think it's such an amazing medium for learning because number one, if you compare it to something like text, you just get so much more depth because you get the speaker's voice, you get the intimacy, you get the tone of what they're saying.
And I've always believed that audio is a great medium for transmitting, you know, knowledge, information and wisdom.
I also think that it's great just because it's such a simple reason.
But you can listen when you're on the go, when you're doing chores.
You know, again, I'm in London, so I spent a lot of my life sitting on buses for hours going into and back from the office.
So, yeah, always been interested in audio.
So before Fountain, I had a previous business that was also working in the audio space with
voice assistants, things like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant.
So I did a lot with audio during that work.
And yeah, I had a previous business.
We ended up selling that business.
And so I had a bit of time in between things to kind of decide what I wanted to do next.
And I've always been a developer, so I always wanted to build a mobile app.
So the first version of Fountain was just a side project that I decided to build around, you know, the idea of sharing short form audio content with people that you know.
And eventually that led to me realizing what's the best source for short form audio content is podcasts because that's where all the audio content is.
and then it just so happened so we had we had this app and then and then nick who is a friend
of mine we've known each other for a long time we were kind of like discussing this and working
on it together but just you know as a side project and then so i was looking around for a podcast api
and that's when i came across adam and dave and podcasting 2.0 literally about a month i think
after they'd first launched the show and also introduced the value block into the rss feed so
that was when it kind of clicked for me straight away. I'd been primed on Bitcoin. I was a massive
believer in Bitcoin for many years before that. I was very interested in audio and podcasting and
how we can make podcasts more discoverable and how we can share the insights that exist within
episodes in a way that you don't have to necessarily follow the feed to see that.
And then all of a sudden I hear Adam, the podfather and Dave talking about how they're integrating the Lightning Network into podcasting.
And it just kind of clicked that this was a cool new opportunity within podcasting that leverages this programmable money that we now have with the Lightning Network.
And so that was when we decided, okay, let's double down on this.
Let's really lean into payments via the Lightning Network within the podcasting app.
and we launched Fountain in a very, very bad state.
But that was how it all got started.
The timing is, it's really amazing, right?
Because the Lightning network early on wasn't very usable.
But by the time Dave and Adam got serious about using it,
it had gotten to a pretty good place.
And so the timing that you have with the namespace they put out there
and the value block and the podcast index API
combined with Lightning getting to a usable state is it's all it all really kind of came together.
But, you know, what you ended up doing amongst the other podcasting 2.0 developers
is created another viable demonstration of how Bitcoin can be used in day to day microtransactions.
And one of the most common criticisms of Bitcoin is that, well, you can't actually spend it on anything.
You can't actually send it anywhere and nobody actually uses it for anything.
But it kind of proved the opposite.
And now there's a demonstratable microtransaction frequent use here.
And it's in podcasting and it's in with music and other things.
Yeah, exactly.
And I think podcasting is just such a great example of an industry and a technology that requires something like lightning because it's fragmented.
You know, you couldn't have interoperable payments and interoperable metadata, which I know we'll get onto in a bit.
you couldn't have that with the fiat payment system because it's all closed off behind,
you know, company APIs. There's no way to share that data publicly. And so it just makes so much
sense for podcasting. Yeah. It's, it's so great when, you know, I'm doing a podcast and people,
I'll play a clip of somebody saying you can't use it for transactions. Meanwhile, people are
literally streaming sats while they listen to the clip. You know, it's just, it's pretty hilarious.
So, okay, so that brings us to Fountain. And is it over ambitious to say that what you're trying to build here is sort of an open alternative to YouTube or Spotify, something that's on top of standards and open payments and RSS feeds?
Yeah, I mean, we want to be very ambitious with Fountain. And I think there's just huge opportunity to create a listening experience that delivers from, you know, the UX and design standards of something like Spotify, but introduces open payments and open discovery so that you can, you know, get more from the listening experience.
and also just interact with the people you follow normally.
The biggest example I like to think of
of what we're trying to fix
is if you imagine a social media site like Twitter or X,
like historically I've used Twitter a lot.
I find it incredibly valuable.
I've learned a lot there.
I've made great connections on there.
Generally, it's been an amazing experience.
But I'm also a huge podcast fan
and listening to podcasts,
talking about my favorite podcast is something that I love doing. But on a social media site like
Twitter or X, there is podcast conversation that goes on there, but it's hidden in this kind of
massive mess of, you know, politics, rage bait, you know, shocking videos, like all of this stuff
that kind of naturally bubbles to the top of an attention based algorithm. And I'm unable to find
the smaller, nicher conversations about podcasts that I love. Even though I follow all of the
podcast hosts on Twitter, that content just doesn't seem to do well in the kind of global
attention algorithm that powers what I see in the feed. And that's why I think that if we can
use these open technologies, Lightning for Payments, NOSTA for Social, to give people
flexibility in how they use social media and allow them to kind of, you know, selectively hide the
things that they don't want to see and only see the things that are relevant to them and what
they're doing at that moment. Like if I open my podcast app or if I open social media on a Saturday
morning and what I really want to do is find a good long episode to listen to while I'm having
a walk and having a coffee. I don't want to see, you know, the latest rage bait political tweet.
I just don't want to see that. I want to see interesting, thoughtful shares about podcast
episodes that maybe I don't see in my library because I don't follow the feed. I just want to
see the people that I respect, the people that I follow, what they've been listening to, what
they've been finding interesting. And that also applies to the time frequency of these feeds as
well. You know, if you open something like Twitter, you're generally only going to see content from
the last, you know, 24 hours, maybe 48 hours. But, you know, I may have missed something. I may have
missed the share about an episode that happened two weeks ago because I don't want to open Twitter
every day. And that's another aspect to how if you create an open social graph, you can have full
flexibility on what you see there. So, yeah, to answer your question directly, we would love to,
you know have the scale of something like spotify but we want to do it in an open way
whereby the social data that we are using within fountain is not locked into fountain
you know people can slice and dice it however they want to build their own experiences with their own
you know sets of algorithms and and trending sections based on whatever they want you know
i just think there's so much opportunity to preserve what we all love about podcasting which
is long form content, you know, niche content that just goes so deep on a particular topic
that is maybe not like, it maybe doesn't have mainstream appeal, but bring the discovery
features of social media and apply it to that in a way where users have control.
Like the discovery on social media is good.
Like there's no denying it.
It surfaces content that you wouldn't have otherwise seen based on your existing interests,
your existing follower graph, like that's great. The problem is that there's just one global
algorithm and there's no way for Twitter to know whether I am in the mood for a podcast episode or
in the mood for, you know, some political rage bait. It just doesn't know how I'm feeling.
But as a podcaster, I would say it also biases video considerably, right? It's not surfacing
podcasts. Exactly, exactly. It's biasing video. So, you know, is the Twitter algorithm going to
show you, you know, a really insightful recommendation for an episode that's audio
only and has a link to link out of Twitter? Or is it going to show you a native Twitter video
with, you know, some political commentary? And I keep using the politics example as a contrast.
I do like political content sometimes, but just...
Actually, you're describing my exact use case. Saturday morning, I got some chorin to do,
and I often fire up the fountain app
and I take a quick look at the feed
just to see if I can find something
that released earlier in the week
that's long form content
because I'm going to be working for an hour or two
and I don't want to switch every 15 minutes.
And I just want something that isn't going to upset me.
You know, I just want something
that's going to be a pleasant listen
while I do some chores.
So you're describing my exact Saturday morning.
And it seems to me like this is the true reason
why you have put so much effort into integrating Noster.
And I know there's probably people listening like,
ah, I don't want to use Noster.
But this is where that open graph comes from, right?
This is where that gives you the ability to collect this information
without having to create some sort of proprietary fountain algorithm
or proprietary fountain data set.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, it's another example of great timing.
So for anyone who's listening who's used Fountain for a few years now,
you'll probably remember the social features that we had pre-Nosta. And it was all, you know,
just locked into the Fountain app. We had our own profiles, we had our own follower graph,
we had our own commenting system that only really worked within the Fountain app. And for years,
we were trying to figure out okay how do we you know create comments sent from other apps How do we publish our own comments so that other apps can ingest them you know the dream of cross comments you know we spent many many years
thinking about this and eventually when Nostra first kind of came on the scene I did think to
myself this is it this is the answer but initially we were like okay is Nostra going to grow does it
have, you know, is it going to work? Are there going to be other clients that are going to start
generating data that we can ingest? And as NOSTA has grown, it's still very small. I think we came
to the realization about a year and a half ago that it was going to work for us. Then the question
was, okay, how do we reliably reference podcasts? How do we kind of join OpenRSS and NOSTA in a way
that's reliable and so I came up with this nip called nip 73 which is the external content ids
nip and that took a long time to you know go back and forth with the NOSTA community and figure out
the right way to do it so but now we have this nip what it essentially does is allows us to reference
podcast guides at the show level but also item guides at the episode level and with those two
sets of tags which are designed in a way that they're NOSTA native and can be queried by any
of the default relay software that's out there it means that now we have a way to tag either a show
or an episode in any NOSTA event that could be you know a kind one post like the ones we use in
fountain that could be live chat message for for live streams that could be you know a long form
article or it could be anything new that comes down the line so once we had those two pieces in
place you know a bit of traction with NOSTA generally and a bit of stability in some of the
you know main NOSTA clients like like Primal and Damus and Amethyst plus the NIP 73 external
content IDs that that kind of enabled us to rebuild all of the social features within Fountain
to use Nostra. And yeah, we launched the Nostra integration last year. And we just relaunched the
Nostra integration a couple of weeks ago with our 1.3 release, where we've introduced a bunch of new
cool things. We've also rebuilt the entire infrastructure for serving the Nostra data.
So everything's a lot more fast and snappy. But yeah, I mean, Nostra is perfect for what we want
to do in terms of creating a social experience around podcasts that, you know, only really applies
to podcasts. And yeah, I mean, at one point, we're thinking, okay, should we use the Twitter API,
but, you know, that's going to cost us like a crazy amount of money, and could be shut down
at any time. So I think NOSTA really is, you know, it may not succeed, but I think it has
an incredible chance to become the social layer of the internet that any developer can build on
and you can use the data from anywhere to power any different app and yeah i've i've i've i'm
trying to push the podcasting 2.0 community towards nostr just because i think it ticks
all of the boxes on what we've been looking for and yeah excited to to have more i know there's a
lot of people working on new podcast listening experiences that use Noster as well. So excited
to see those come out. I could definitely see Noster helping the podcasting 2.0 project
maintain or achieve greater decentralization too. So I think that's a lens in which perhaps
they should consider it. You know, I've been seeing more engagement on Noster in the last
three months than I think I have in the last year. So there is something to it. And I do contribute
some of that to Fountain because if somebody ties their Fountain profile to a Nostra identity and
then they boost the show, well, then I can easily follow them on Nostra. And so I'm building out
my Nostra social network just by following folks that follow the show and they follow me. And so
it's, I don't, there is a bit of a network effect happening there. And I got to say the 1.3 release,
new home tabs, great. And search is great. The Nostra stuff just feels super smooth now. I didn't,
I didn't realize you'd rebuilt the infrastructure for it.
So it really does feel like this is the version you could tell people,
go out and try this now.
It's really, it's come a long ways.
Let's talk about the transition happening in the background around boosts.
So today, most boosts are done using our old friend Keysend,
which doesn't really have much adoption in the wider Lightning ecosystem.
Could you just give us like a TLDR on the history around Keysend
and why it's maybe not the future of boosting
and how we need to transition to something,
but we're not quite there yet.
Yeah, happy to give a brief history
of the two different protocols within Lightning
and also where we're at now
and why I think this transition makes sense.
So the key difference between Bolt 11,
which is what is used under the hood of Lightning address,
and Keysend is that Bolt 11 requires an invoice.
So in order to send a payment to someone over the Lightning Network, you need to first request an invoice and then you can pay that invoice.
And when it comes to metadata, there's only a small field that you can add to when you're paying that invoice.
It's the comment field.
And I think it's limited to something like 200 characters, which is why it's not as expressive in terms of what Keysen provides with the TLV records.
key send on the other hand is kind of like a push payment that doesn't require as much
interactivity you can essentially just push money to any destination if you have that destination's
node pub key so for the kinds of things that podcasting 2.0 has been doing in terms of you
know the craziness of streaming money every minute and sometimes to large sets of splits you know i've
seen splits up to like 20 different splits so you're talking about 20 individual payments every
minute you know the amount of interactivity matters and so key send at the beginning looks
very promising and because of that kind of lower interactivity key send also has the ability to
attach quite a large amount of metadata in what's called the TLV records so at the beginning of
Broadcasting 2.0, if you were to choose between Bolt 11 invoices, which is the kind of standard
way of doing payments on Lightning and Keysend, Keysend would have made a lot more sense. And I
can see why, you know, Adam and Dave initially adopted that and we used it for years and it
worked really well. The issue with Keysend is the lack of adoption in other wallets and the confusion
that that brings to people coming into the world of Bitcoin, coming into the world of
podcasting 2.0 because you have to remember that with lightning there is slow adoption and this
adoption happens in different ways in different countries around the world in different regions
very few lightning wallets today support the key send protocol and trying to onboard people to
bitcoin and to lightning to a wallet with key send is is very difficult there's just so few options
the other issue with keysend is a ux issue so you know the lightning address is an amazing construct
that i think will be the equivalent of an email address in the future it makes sense to everybody
if you've never heard of bitcoin before if you don't know what the lightning address the lightning
network is if i explain to you that hey this lightning address is like an email address for
money all you have to do is give your lightning address to somebody and they can pay you that
makes sense to anybody it's really clear it's easy to understand it's you know it's side by
side with email as something that people can just understand immediately lightning address is built
on top of bolt 11 and so one of the issues we were seeing with keysend is people saying i have a
lightning address why can i not get paid in podcasting 2.0 i have a lightning address you
know i've got my strike wallet i've got my cash app wallet why can i not participate in podcasting
2.0 and then we'd have to get into the conversation of oh well there's actually two protocols within
lightning there's keysend and there's lnurl bolt 11 lightning address and they're not quite the
same thing and you need to make sure and that's where you lose people in terms of the onboarding
I think I believe Lightning will be the kind of future of the payments layer on the internet.
And the way that it's going to get there is through easy UX.
The easy UX is the Lightning address.
It just makes so much sense.
So yeah, it's the combination of lack of support from wallets and the kind of product market fit easy UX of the Lightning address.
that for me is the kind of core reasons
why podcasting 2.0 community
wants to move from Key Center Lightning address.
I think that, you know,
obviously I've been a big advocate
for making this change,
but I think if you speak to
any of the podcasters
that are involved with, you know,
onboarding their audience
who are maybe not that technical
and are brand new to Bitcoin,
or if you speak to app developers
that are trying to understand
how do I attach a wallet to my podcast app?
How do I go through the process of doing that?
I think everyone does agree that Bolt 11
and Lightning Address is the way forward.
It's obviously just a big change within Podcasting 2.0.
And the big outstanding issue is the metadata
and how we solve that.
But I'm convinced that it's the right move.
And the more we can just simplify this for everybody,
the more chance we have of wider adoption of Bitcoin.
and enlightening. It's easier on the podcasters too, right? Because the way it works now is in
order for a listener to send me a boost, I put my node address in the value block in our RSS feed.
Well, a node address is, it's a pretty long thing. And sometimes you have multiple users on a single
node. So then there's a little extra steps you have to take there. And it's not clean. And it's
also not easy to update. Like I have changed out nodes and I don't know, six months later,
I'm still, somebody's got an old cache of the feed and they're sending sats to an old node
address, where if I could just keep the entry in the RSS feed as an email address, as an
LNURL, then on the back end, I change what that LNURL points to.
So I think it's got advantages there.
It's easier for co-hosts, all that stuff.
But you mentioned metadata, and I want to just define a little bit.
So the metadata includes things like what episode you're listening to, what show you're
listening to, your podcast client, and your handle that you've chosen.
Oh, and also, the other thing that's actually quite valuable is the total amount of the
boost that you're sending. So maybe I only get a 5% split, but I know the total amount. So when I go
to give the listener credit on air, I credit them for the total amount, not just the 5% split that
went to my node, because that's also in this. So there's some pretty valuable information in that
metadata, which has not yet been really solved, at least universally, for the LNURL approach.
So I'm curious what your current thoughts are around that challenge.
yeah so it's definitely you're definitely right that metadata is so valuable and any
if we if we're to agree on a system going forward it has to include a provision for sending that
metadata i i think the first thing to say is that i think there are many options here it's just a
question of everybody coming together and choosing an option which is always difficult right it's
always difficult when you're working in you know an open specification with multiple different apps
and hosting companies and you know players for everybody to agree is a difficult thing but i
think that it's possible and there's some really good options out there i would also point out that
the key send metadata did have some flaws one example being what you just mentioned around the
total if you're only receiving a split. So if you're only receiving a 5% split,
you know, there's just a number that gets inserted into that split payment, which tells you what the
total was, but that is totally spoofable. You know, someone could just put in whatever they
want there. It's not an ideal way of you kind of validating that, validating what the total is and
what the other splits were. The other thing is failed payments as well. That valued MSAT total
field in the TLB doesn't tell you if one of the split payments failed to one of the other
recipients in the episode. So there are issues with the current metadata system.
But I think more importantly, yeah, it's more about the move to Lightning address.
Like, yeah, I can share some ideas on what I think the path forward is, if that's useful.
Yeah, I'd be curious because I think it's a tough spot and there does need to be leadership isn't quite the right word, but there needs to be momentum in here for consensus to be achieved, right? Because it's a loose group of independent folks organized around a project. And so there's not really momentum yet. So I'd be curious to know what you're thinking.
Yeah, okay. I'll share my ideas. So I think you've already heard me talk about Noster and why I love it and why I think it can really help open podcasting kind of not only match the big centralized apps like Spotify, but actually build even better experiences.
So the first idea for sharing metadata via LN address does use NOSTA.
Before I share the details, I also want to say that NOSTA is seeing really good adoption.
And many, many people are having their first experience, their first touchpoint with Lightning on NOSTA.
And they'll download a NOSTA client like Primal, they'll set up a wallet,
and they'll start receiving zaps for their regular posts on social media.
or NOSTA social media.
And so NOSTA clients are onboarding people to Lightning.
They're giving them a Lightning address
and they're also giving them a profile.
And I do think that NOSTA
is gonna be part of the Lightning story
and it's gonna drive the standards in Lightning
going forward.
And so I think the more that Podcasting 2 can align with that the better because we still a very small group and we still yet to see you know a mainstream adoption of Lightning within for example
the existing hosting companies. Yes, some of the hosting companies have added, you know,
freeform fields to, you know, add your key send information, but there's not really been too much
more than that whereas on the NOSTA side there's a lot more kind of like deep integrations with
Lightning and with wallets so and I also think that going forward the way that we are going to
navigate the internet we're going to have two things that we need to navigate the internet the
first is our Lightning address so that we can get paid anywhere and our Lightning wallet so that we
can pay people anywhere on the internet. And the second is going to be our end pub so that we can
interact as us on any website and bring our follower graph and our interest graph to those
websites. So yeah, with that said, the first idea is just to reuse what is already there,
which is the NOSTA ZAP spec. So the way ZAPs work on NOSTA is the person sending the payment
signs a NOSTA event, which is the ZAP request.
And this is the proof that the person sending the payment
has initiated the payment.
And then the receiving wallet signs a ZAP receipt,
which includes the ZAP request inside of it
and publishes that if and only if the payment succeeds.
So this is the way ZAPs work on NOSTA.
And the ZAP spec combined with what I talked about earlier
in terms of those podcast GUID tags in NOSTA event,
has everything we need to publish all of the data
that was previously in the QSEN TLV.
The great thing about this as well
is Lightning wallets already know how to publish Zap receipts.
So if you're using Albi,
Albi wallets know how to publish Zap receipts
because Albi are big supporters and believers in NOSTA.
if you're using strike the strike wallet knows how to publish zap receipts as well
so we don't need to convince the receiving wallets to support nostr and support nostr zap receipts
they already do and more and more supporting nostr and things like nostr wallet connect are becoming
you know the the kind of headline features for lightning wallets and so i think we'll see more
and more these Nostra Zap receipts publishing being supported. So really, if you think about it,
if you had a episode and you had three splits in the episode, you had a fountain wallet as one of
the splits, you had an Albi lightning address as the next split, and then you had a strike wallet
as the third split. All three of those wallets support Nostra Zap receipts. And so for a podcast
app to you know share the metadata about the boost all they have to do is sign a zap request
and attach it when they're create when they're sent when they're paying the bolt 11 lightning
address payment so an app like podcast guru for example which already supports paying lightning
addresses through through their strike integration they already know how to pay bolt 11 invoices
the only difference when sending a zap is just this signing of a zap request and inserting that
into the url when you're requesting the invoice it's actually very simple to do you know you
construct some json which every developer knows how to do and then you sign it using some
cryptographic primitives that are available on every platform there's libraries to do it and
what's cool about this is you can put any tags in the NOSTA zap request so you can put obviously
the episode and show guides which allow you to you know like properly assign the zap to an episode
or a show but you can also put other things in there you can put the message you could put the
timestamp of the episode you could put anything you want really and then when it comes to the value
MSAT total for calculating the total of all splits, you could put that in the NOSTA ZAP
request. But also, there's actually a better way to do it, which is just to query the NOSTA
network for all of the ZAP receipts, because then you can take into account failed payments
and things like that. So yeah, option one for how I think we should move forward is just reusing
what's already there, what already has adoption on every single NOSTA client, which is the ZAP
spec right um it doesn't change anything for podcasting 2.0 you know interactions we don't
have to call them zaps we can still call them boost it's just the way that podcasting 2.0 apps
and hosting companies will pass around this data is on the nostor network yeah the lift there is on
the developer side i suppose the the upside would be is then assuming you had broad adoption
if people that were creating these apps wanted they'd have a rich set of discovery data that
they could integrate into their apps.
Exactly, yeah.
As Fountain, we would love to see all of the boosts happening
on all of the different podcasting 2.0 apps
and put them on our episode pages, display them in our feeds.
We would love to do that.
And also, our payment information is already out there.
We publish it on Nostra via the ZapSpec today.
So if any app developer wants to query the Fountain relay
for Zaps for a specific episode,
you can do that today it's really easy you know it's a very small query just based on the show
good and the episode good so it also doing it this way doesn't just solve the problem of how do we
send the metadata it also solves the problem of how do we have the metadata available for anybody
that wants to query it and use it in an interesting way which with the keys and tlv we that that
didn't exist. There's no way for me to kind of, you know, connect into someone's helipad and pull
out all of the payment data so that I can include it. I was just thinking like you could see somebody
out there build a helipad as a service that pulls this from Nostra for podcasters, because I don't
know how other podcasters collect their booths and read them on air. Like we've had to build
a series of tools to collect them and mark them up and format them. Like somebody could build that
as a service if that information was publicly available. Yeah, exactly. And I've always thought
like the service that's going to build the best, you know, charts within podcasting shouldn't be
one of the apps or hosting companies. It should be, you know, someone who collates that data from
everywhere. And if we have a metadata system for payments and social data, like comments,
that is truly open and anyone can query, then it allows those like third party services to spin up
and provide value in different ways.
And that's how we can get to the point
where we're really competing with apps like Spotify
because, you know, Fountain, we're a tiny team.
You know, we don't have the resources to do everything.
But if we can make all of the data open,
then we don't have to.
You know, everybody can kind of pick the thing
that they're most interested in,
whether that's analytics, whether that's, you know, social,
whether that's onboarding, whether that's payments
and just contribute their little piece.
That's a great point.
And it adds just another, yes,
We have something that's super chat competitive.
We have a live competitive.
I think you and I are pretty much in consensus here.
The challenge seems to be it is a lift for these app developers.
And some of them have already gone down the path of activity pub.
Other folks are sort of committed to doing as little as possible on the client side and not having server infrastructure.
So that seems to be maybe where the biggest friction is just the lift by the developers.
Don't you think?
Yeah, I think so.
And I think that, to be honest, you know, I think you were right when you said it requires some momentum.
And I think, you know, from my perspective, originally, I think it was December of last year, which is when I went on Podcasting 2.0.
And we talked through, you know, the switch to LN address and why it was important.
And, you know, generally there was consensus then that, yes, we want to do this.
It's going to be difficult.
It's going to take time.
I think to be honest, like we've just been so busy with Fountain 1.3 launch, you know, getting the Fountain app to a place, as you say, where we can share it and showcase a great experience that we haven't put that much time into it in terms of showcasing how easy it can be.
So I think, you know, now that we've got 1.3 out of the way, we can kind of do more in terms of showcasing actually how easy it is.
If you're already paying a Bolt 11 invoice, like Podcast Guru, for example, to attach a signed JSON payload to that payment request is very easy.
It doesn't take much time.
And also the important thing to note is that you don't have to use NOSTA's social features to use the data transport features of NOSTA.
You don't have to add profiles to your app.
You don't have to add comments.
You don't have to do any of that.
You can just use the NOSTA network for transmitting the payment metadata.
I'm really glad you mentioned that because I think that is something people kind of connect is, oh, now I have to have a NOSTA profile.
And it's right.
It's in a way, it's this unbelievable gift of this decentralized relay network that moves notes around.
And you could just think of it as that, really.
And that's where I'm really surprised that the developers of these different apps haven't leaned more into it when you think of it that way.
But so speaking of momentum, is the thought to try to come up with a workable system that Fountain can show as sort of like a here's an example?
yeah that that's that's the goal is to just have some sample code that shows okay you know side by
side here's what you were inserting to the keys and tlv before and here's how you can just recreate
that exact thing attach it to the lightning address bolt 11 payment and publish it to a relay and like
literally here's the code like here's the the javascript code if you're using react native
Here's the Swift code if you're using iOS and just showcase that code because I think that it can be intimidating, especially when you think about, you know, cryptographic signing and key pairs and stuff like that.
But the libraries exist.
It's very easy.
You don't have to have a profile.
You don't even have to have, you know, the ability like Fountain has where you can import your Nostra profile.
you could just create a key pair that lives in the podcast app and it never goes anywhere and
it's just purely for sending metadata so yeah that's definitely the plan to get some sample
code out here and and hopefully just find one other app that is willing to do this i mean
wave lake for music already does this they use the same spec all of the payments that happen
in the wave lake mobile app get broadcast onto nostr so as a developer if you were to go and
query either the fountain relay or the wave lake relay today you would be able to pull all of the
boosts for all of the music whether it's hosted on wave lake or self-hosted or anywhere else
and you'd be able to load all of the boosts for for a particular track or a particular artist or
a particular album so it is working it's just you know it just requires that final push and that big
change but i i'm hopeful i think i think we're getting there you know i think spoken to some of
the other podcasting 2.0 app developers,
they're looking into this,
they're working on it,
identifying different choices.
But I think, yeah,
one big final kind of pitch
from me on the Noster side
would maybe be helpful.
So hopefully I'll send this episode around.
Maybe we can see what progress we'll make.
I hope so.
I'm keen to,
I am keen to see that transition work out.
A lot of the,
for the reasons you articulated
around just the ease of use of LN URL
and the fact that sort of unlike Keysend,
it's the, all of this,
this would be based on technology
that's sort of ascending
because not only do you have the Noster network effect,
but like you mentioned, Strike,
which is an extremely fast growing application.
And there's several others too that support it already.
Primal also is becoming more and more
of just a go-to lightning wallet for folks
that just works out of the box.
And so there's just, there's a lot we could tap into
and sort of ride that wave there.
Yeah. And I think the other thing as well is, and I know your audience is very technical, Chris, but anyone who hasn't, who has just a tiny little bit of technical experience, just go and open up a WebSocket client and just connect to a relay and start playing around.
because I think once you have that experience
where you see, oh wait, all of the data in Primal
is just available to me if I want it.
I can query it, I can export it,
I could set up my own relay.
It just kind of makes you realize how powerful this is
when you compare it to something like the Twitter
or Facebook or TikTok world
where everything is just behind a closed wall
and you can't get access to it.
You don't really know what's going on.
Right, it actually could very easily
see me wanting to run my own relay in the future if this was a system you know that's and again it
comes back to i do kind of like to self-host a lot of this not all of it but yeah yeah so like
so like yeah you could absolutely and we we've built our own relay at fountain because we have
kind of like an additional layer of feed building for specific mediums so we have like podcast only
feeds and music only feeds in the app so we've we've built our relay from scratch twice once again
with the 1.3 release and yeah it's like it's totally possible to go go and build your own
relay and if the scope of what you're building is narrow like let's say you only cared about
NOSTA events that have these podcast tags in them then the data set is not going to be that large
either. So you can run it on a very, you know, a very cheap server, you can, you know, not have to
worry about scaling or anything like that. So it's very enjoyable to go out there and yeah, build a
very simple relay. And there's great open source, like starter projects for relays as well. Like
there's one, there's the stir fry relay, there's just a bunch of different projects that let you
get started. Well, you know, this really could be another one of those perfect timing moments,
because the Noster Network is built out the ZapSpec is well understood clients are supporting it And podcasting 2 does need a solution to replace the keys and base boost Because right now
like you said, we're just limited to a handful of clients. And it sort of means less people can
participate. So hopefully we see this get resolved. Of course, I'm sure I'll be trying out whatever
comes along. So the audience will stay tuned for the ride with me. I wanted to chat about something
that I don't think I've ever heard you speak to before.
And so I've thought about long-term
here at Jupyter Broadcasting,
I think we'll probably try to use our Bitcoin
not as like a treasury,
but as kind of a strategic reserve in a sense
where if there's a really bad year
or if there's a crazy project that we want to try
that there's a hard way to fund,
I view it as people that are supporting the shows today
are giving the network future runway
and flexibility down the road.
And I'm curious if you've had any thoughts around how Fountain might have, if there will be a Bitcoin strategy, if there already is talks of a Bitcoin strategy where Fountain may accumulate some Bitcoin for your balance sheet over time.
Yeah, that's a great question. I think that one of our goals is to, you know, have revenue in Bitcoin because we think that it just puts us in a really strong position for the future.
so we want our revenue to be in bitcoin and that's why with all of the payment payments
features other than the app subscription to placate apple and google we have the option
to pay in bitcoin and we take our very small fee in bitcoin i think whilst you know i would love to
have you know a massive bitcoin treasury for the company and you know think about those kind of
things. I don't really, to be honest, because the priorities for me are more immediate in terms of
improving the listening experience within the app, you know, helping podcasters and their audience
understand Bitcoin and feel comfortable with it. And I just think that there's so much more
work to do in particularly those two areas of UX and onboarding that thinking about
things like a long-term Bitcoin treasury for Fountain as a company just seems kind of like
too far into the future. But yeah, I think the more that we can have our revenue in Bitcoin,
the better. But ultimately, that's going to be through our small transaction fees
on the support payments. But yeah, it is interesting. I think as well, the other thing
I would say is that I think the services like transcripts and things,
there's a lot more interesting work we can do there in terms of sending a micro payment
to gain access to some kind of transcript-based feature.
I think there's a lot there we can explore as well.
Right, right.
I do think it's pretty neat, too, the experimentation with supporting different payment methods
for subscriptions and bonus episodes
where you can subscribe with fiat or sats.
And you can also do a one-off purchase
with sats or fiat.
That seems like one of the root
of what I'm trying to get at is like,
what's the long-term kind of strategy
for a company that is embracing Bitcoin,
that is trying to onboard people
to all these technologies
that doesn't involve like slapping
a bunch of ads into the app.
I mean, I know you have the premium membership,
which I'm a member of,
but I'm kind of curious
what your thoughts are there.
And it sounds like a bit of it might be
some of the small transaction fees.
But do you think that's enough there
with that and the memberships?
Yeah, so I'll just run through
the ways that Fountain makes money as a business.
The first is our app premium subscription
and we're really appreciative to everyone
that supports us through the app premium subscription.
We wouldn't be where we are at today without that.
So we're really grateful for it.
I also know that the majority of the people
that subscribe via the app premium subscription do so because they like what we're doing like the
actual the what you get for that is lower transaction fees from five percent to one percent
but most people just do it because they like what we're doing and we can definitely improve that in
terms of making the premium subscription more valuable we've got some great stuff coming down
the line which yeah it should make the experience of using the app better the other is since we've
moved into also offering a hosting product through our kind of merging with RSS Blue.
That is a paid product and we want to, you know, offer great value to podcasters and have them make
money and so they can pay us for the product. I think that will be significant revenue for us
going forward. And then finally, there's the transaction fees on the support payment. So
whether you are sending a boost, streaming stats every minute, supporting a podcaster through the
monthly subscription that they set up, or just purchasing a one-off bonus episode, you know,
Fountain takes a small fee on that. But over time, we think that that can be massive. Because
if you look at something like Patreon, it's a massive business, and it helps podcasters make,
you know, a massive amount of money. I think the issue with Patreon is that it's closed off. So
the biggest example I've always thought about is if you subscribe to a private feed on Patreon,
or one of the other services that does similar things, and then you, you know, you can't share
it. So you might have listened to like, the example I always give is Dan Carlin, right? I love Dan
Carlin, some of the best history episodes I've ever listened to. But there's no way for me to
share those episodes with people because they're behind a paywall. And they're also behind a
terrible kind of UX flow with a really old sign up process, private feed, you know, it's just a
terrible experience. I think what we can do and what we want to do is to recreate the kind of
frictionless payment experience of Patreon, but do it in a way where it's open and it's not hidden.
So you can still share the episode, you can still comment on the episode, you can still,
you know, send a one off payment to the episode, you can see what people in your follower graph
are saying about that episode. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And then back to your
original question about Bitcoin, you know, we know that the journey of moving the world of payments
on the internet to Bitcoin and the Lightning Network is not easy. It's not easy to onboard
people to this technology because it's intimidating. There's a lot of fear about Bitcoin being a scam
and all of these things that headlines have told people.
And so that's the reason that with the new subscription
and one-time purchase features,
we've added the ability to use Stripe
so that when we're talking to podcasters,
when we're talking to people about the payment experience,
we can say, hey, this is exactly like Patreon.
You can pay with Apple Pay.
You can pay with a bank card.
Don't worry, it's totally fine.
But then I think the way that we transition people to Bitcoin
is the fees.
because currently the fees on the bank card payments are much higher.
So it's about 8% in total, whereas the fees on Lightning payments are only 2%.
So if we can build up trust with podcasters that are not so familiar with Bitcoin
and then say to them, hey, you're using this product, it's working for you,
why don't you ask your audience to try the Bitcoin payments
because you'll have 4x lower fees.
And so ultimately, I think that's the way that we can slowly onboard people to Bitcoin and Lightning.
Yeah, and I think another key thing, and I know this is always something you're working on, but making it easier for new folks to acquire sats.
Yeah, yeah.
This has been such a struggle because, you know, this is something that we talked about, you know, three years ago.
It's been top of our priority list for so long, but it's really frustrating that it's out of our control.
because in order to do it in a compliant way,
we have to have the right licenses.
So we're working really closely with Zebedee
who power all of our payments infrastructure
and we should have something to kind of share
and showcase on that very soon
because yeah, right now it's too difficult.
We used to have an integration with MoonPay
so that you could buy stats in the app,
but the user experience was so bad
that we actually felt it was kind of putting people off a bit,
but we should have some news on that soon.
But yeah, that is a real difficulty.
Yeah.
You know, one of the ways that,
I mean, not to circle back again,
but if they're on Noster
and people are getting zapped for their content
or they're on Fountain
and they're earning sats listening to podcasts,
they can just turn around and boost that.
And I hear from people that do that.
You know, every week I'll get somebody
that sent in their sats that they earned on Fountain
or they got zapped on Noster.
So it's a way for people to get started
without even having to connect to,
you know, a bank account and a sat source.
So there's something there to that too,
embracing that ecosystem for that reason.
Yeah, definitely.
I think there's a lot more that can be done
in that area as well.
I think, you know, that we want to do a lot more
with the like earnings and reward features within Fountain,
but we kind of paused all of that
because we just wanted to focus 100% on the listener experience,
the UX of the library, the UX of the player,
the native features like CarPlay,
all of the things that make the listening experience better.
So once we still have more to do,
but once all of that feels in a really solid place,
then we can re-look at some of those features
that make it more easy and fun for someone that's new
to acquire their first Bitcoin for free
by winning something or...
participating, things like that.
The buzz that would generate.
Well, 1.3 is a great release.
I had been biting my tongue because I've been on the beta
and I kind of knew what was coming
and I knew what my favorite features were,
but it's really great to see just a steady level
of improvements coming.
So if people haven't checked out Fountain for a while,
go to fountain.fm and get the latest version
because it's coming along really nice.
Oscar, thanks for spending some time with me
and going over all of this.
yeah thanks so much Chris really enjoyed talking with you and as always like really appreciate
all of the support and the feedback that you give us it's incredible and also you know so many of
your audience as well who share really great feedback with us you know we listen to everything
so yeah great to catch up I'll keep pushing hard on the metadata issue because I think if we can
solve it and bring some of this interoperability that I've talked about I think it's going to level
up open podcasting and showcase the lightning network but yeah if anyone listening you know
has any feedback about the app or anything i've talked about today like please do reach out you
know my email is oscar at fountain.fm or you can just tag me on nostr or on twitter anything like
that yeah we really appreciate all the feedback because sometimes it's just you know the tiniest
things that you know we're heads down every day we don't notice about the way the app works or the
design. So we really appreciate all that feedback. You might get a little more luck on Nostar than
X, I'm just saying, but thank you, sir. It's good to talk to you.
I hope you enjoyed that chat with Oscar. He has a very sharp mind. I'm always impressed
how he can hold the question, give a long explanation, and then come back to the original
question and answer everything in there. We did get into the podcasting weeds a bit,
but I feel like there's probably very few interviewers, not to boast, who could ask
some of the questions I could. There are some, but not many. So I hope you found it insightful
that we were able to get into some of that kind of stuff and the wider Bitcoin topics as well.
Let me know how I did with the boost. Would you like to hear another one of these?
Let me know, or maybe you wouldn't. You can also support the show by doing what you do.
You can buy your sats on River. One of the best ways to stack sats in the U.S.,
You can support the show by using the link in our show notes.
If you're all about self-custody, the Bitcoin will.
An amazing automatic self-custody Bitcoin platform in Canada and the United States.
And if you've got some sats burning a hole in your pocket on the Lightning Network,
the Bitcoin company.
Again, link in the notes.
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You can even log in with your Lightning.
The Fold card.
One of our community's favorite ways to stack sats while they pay bills.
and all the other day-to-day stuff.
Bold card!
And of course, Salt Lending.
Now, with margin call protection,
which I'm going to be looking into,
tell you what,
Salt Lending lets you access the value of your Bitcoin
without having to sell it.
And a great UI to manage everything.
You can make payments with ACH
or your stablecoins if you want.
So all links are in the show notes.
You can support the show by using one of those.
Just doing what you do.
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You can go to thisweekinbitcoin.show for the links this week and everything I talked about.
Again, that's thisweekinbitcoin.show.
And while you're over there, you can always check out the other Jupyter Broadcasting shows.
You never know.
If you like self-hosted topics and open source, go check out Linux Unplugged.
And if you want to see the wild side, go check out the launch.
Thanks for being here on This Week in Bitcoin.
And I'll see you next time.
Thank you.