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It's great the Trump administration has walked back some of that.

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They're said we're not going to bring these kinds of charges, but whoever is in the White

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House next can undo that and probably will.

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You know, the pendulum likes to swing both ways.

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It will presumably swing the other way soon.

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Whether people are happy or not with that, that might mean anti-crypto, anti-Bitcoin.

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And this is something they will probably try again.

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And if they do, that means we don't get access to the kinds of good wallets we want.

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We don't get access to Phoenix.

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We're not going to get access to Lightning wallets.

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roll-ups are dead, ARK, Spark, all of these things that you might have heard of or might not have

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heard of yet that are coming down the pipeline to wallets to improve the UX, make it really,

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really usable, make Bitcoin awesome, we can't have as Americans. We can't build an America,

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and we can't allow others to service to Americans. So we need to get the law changed so that

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developers, so that people running these kinds of wallets are protected so that we can have

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access to these things in the US.

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The Bitcoin Podcast

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Bitcoin.net slash titcoin. On X, YouTube, and Rumble, just search at Walker America.

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And find this podcast on X and Instagram at titcoinpodcast. Head to the show notes for

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sponsor links, head to substack.com slash at Walker America to get episodes emailed to you,

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and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else. Without further ado, let's get into this

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Bitcoin talk.

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Matt, glad to have you here.

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Hopefully you're also relatively recovered from Vegas,

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but I know you've been hitting the circuit of podcasts,

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so that can be quite taxing.

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Yeah, thanks for having me.

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Yeah, I've been on tour, as it were,

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trying to get the message out.

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It's been, you know, it's fun.

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It's fun to hang out and chat Bitcoin with people

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for an hour at a time,

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but it also means I don't get my normal work done.

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Yeah. And just for so you are what what is your your head of something at Spiral, right?

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I don't know. I'm an engineer. I guess I'm the most tenured engineer on the Spiral team.

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So we work on lightning. We work on making lightning more accessible, better for wallets and hoping to our real goal is to make Bitcoin the best money.

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I mean, that's that's the top one of blocks top line goals and to use that within block.

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But then our goal is viral is to just just make Bitcoin the best money.

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I still remember and I mentioned this to you at in Vegas, one of the Bitcoin conference presentations from all the conferences I've been to that has stuck with me the most.

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that I will just always remember was your talk at TabConf in 2022, I think.

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It was basically the premise was like lightning screwed, but maybe not.

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But it is, but maybe not.

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And I don't know, it was just, it was masterful.

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And I maybe want to revisit some of your theses from that a little bit later on in this,

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just because I thought that was just a banger of a talk.

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Also, the keynote that you gave right before,

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You were the last speaker before Trump went on stage last year, which was amazing because you gave a really important, like not just some fluffy, you know, NGU talk.

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You gave like a, hey, this is a thing we need to pay attention to with mining centralization.

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And you gave it to the most packed house you possibly could have.

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So I thought that was pretty cool.

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The most packed house of people on their phones.

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Well, okay, fair enough.

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I was paying attention to it for what it's worth.

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for sure for sure some others were as well uh but that yeah that's fair um but okay today and like

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the reason that you had reached out we chatted at the conference a little bit you had some very uh

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some very cool hats which i believe you're wearing now yep okay awesome so i'm just going to

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preemptively tell people to go to save our wallets.org uh which i thought initially just

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knowing you i was like is this going to be some sort of a deep troll is this like is this matt

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playing some sort of a long game no no this is this is very uh very real and a very serious thing

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so i want to just kind of get right into that to make sure we we cover it can you tell us like what

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is going on what is save our wallets.org and like what are we talking about here why is there why did

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you create a website just for uh for this yeah yeah so in the the so most people are familiar

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with the samurai and the tornado cash cases uh the doj brought charges against non-custodial

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wallet, non-custodial platform, saying, oh, you were a money transmitter, which basically

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is the class of rules that requires KYC, AML, all the stuff that you'd have to do with a bank,

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all the stuff that you have to do with a custodial institution. And they said, no, no,

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no, even though you were non-custodial, you had to comply with all these laws.

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It was not possible for them to comply with these laws. The people they were supposed to register

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with would not have accepted their registration because they didn't think they needed to register.

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But nonetheless, the DOJ brought these charges and, you know, maybe they'll win in court.

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The DOJ has now dropped some of those charges.

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But importantly, it had a chilling effect, right?

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We saw Phoenix, this great lightning wallet, decide to pull out of the U.S. market.

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And a lot of developers were asking questions.

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So, yeah, it's great.

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The Trump administration has walked back some of that.

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They said we're not going to bring these kinds of charges, but whoever is in the White House next can undo that and probably will.

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You know, the pendulum likes to swing both ways.

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It will presumably swing the other way soon.

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Whether people are happy or not with that, that might mean anti-crypto, anti-Bitcoin.

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And this is something they will probably try again.

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And if they do, that means we don't get access to the kinds of good wallets we want.

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We don't get access to Phoenix.

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We're not going to get access to Lightning wallets.

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Roll-ups are dead.

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ARK, Spark, all of these things that you might have heard of or might not have heard of yet

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that are coming down the pipeline to wallets to improve the ux make it really really usable make

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bitcoin awesome we can't have as americans we can't build an america and we can't allow others

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to service to americans which is which is kind of insane because purportedly we're the freest

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country in the world supposedly and by many metrics yes like you know i forget who it was

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that described it this way it may have been may have been greg foss a canadian who you know is

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looking for down from our american attic at america but saying basically you know america's

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the prettiest horse at the glue factory like yeah it's it's still a horse at the glue factory but

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it's the best looking one there right but this is kind of insane though and just to uh to loop back

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on one thing you mentioned because i think this is actually really important for people to realize

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why the pendulum swinging back and forth actually makes such a difference and you need like you need

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actual protections like that are codified into law the uh fincen basically said no this uh this

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they're not violating anything like the this doesn't apply money transmitter doesn't apply

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from our perspective like no it's it's all good the prosecutors went ahead with it anyway

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knowing that and i think uh sam shpira at the bdc policy institute has done like a lot to kind of

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uncover that and showcase i know a lot of people have this is just what i've seen

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But this is kind of like why there is actually some some really dire need to make this stuff happen at a regulatory level, because if it's just prosecutors from an administration being left up to it, they'll just do whatever they want.

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Like, it doesn't matter what a particular agency says. Right.

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Totally. Yeah. And, you know, there are a lot of prosecutors in the United States.

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They can make decisions, you know, the obviously their boss can tell them no, but whether they're paying close enough attention.

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But yeah, more importantly, the next administration, who knows what they're going to do.

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And so we really need to get the law changed.

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We need to make it clear that, look, if you're not a custodial platform, you know, you still

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have to enforce sanctions.

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You still can't like open a channel with someone in Iran, whatever.

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But you don't have to do KYC, AML, these things that you can't actually do, right?

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We're not talking about stuff where it's like, oh, well, these wallets just don't want to

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do.

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It's like, no, they can't.

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You cannot do AML at that level on Lightning, on any of these platforms.

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You know, you can't run a Lightning wallet and submit to yearly examinations about whether

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or not your AML system is up to par.

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Like, this isn't, it's not practical.

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It's not feasible.

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It's just not a thing.

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And so we need to get the law changed so that developers, so that people running these kinds

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of wallets are protected so that we can have access to these things in the US.

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and i mean does this is this something that potentially has ramifications further than just

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like if an individual is listening to this and they're thinking well okay maybe some companies

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need to worry about this what's the big deal but like this could conceivably this kind of precedent

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could be used to go after just like even individual node runners right who are operating lightning

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channels with each other like there there's there's no reason like if they if they have a

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bone to pick with you they can use this as an attack vector essentially oh totally yeah especially

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lightning nodes, you know, any of these, I like to refer to them as ancillary services to non

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custodial wallets. So these, these service providers, these sequencers, these lightning

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nodes, you know, sometimes it's decentralized network, sometimes it's an individual company,

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they can all be targeted with this kind of reasoning. You know, the DOJ said that a frying

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pan transmits heat, and thus anyone involved in transmitting any data for a non custodial

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wallet as a money transmitter um did they actually say that that was their argument in the in the

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filing is a frying pan transmits heat and an ethernet cable transmits data and thus everyone

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is a money transmitter and it's like well if you take that to its logical conclusion your isp is a

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money transmitter because they let you use bitcoin on the network right it's it's absurd how broad

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they wanted to define money transmission here um and so it needs to be clarified like this is

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nonsense i mean that that's i i'm now remembering this because i think there were jokes about like

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you know stainless steel versus cast iron pans and you know which was but it's just like it's

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it's just so insane like that like that that's like an argument that was made like by very

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serious people who can just literally throw you in jail like that's those are people that can come

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and take away your freedom and they're making arguments based on like you know fucking heat

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transfer i mean it's just it's just that's just nuts it's just you know they can maybe you end up

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winning in court. It doesn't matter. You still spent three years sitting in jail, rotting in a

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cell, and no developer, no wallet software vendor is going to take that risk. Right. And so, you

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know, there's a lot of Bitcoiners like, oh, well, we shouldn't let the government, whatever, we

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should take our freedoms, not, you know, ask the government to change the rules. And that's fair,

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but no one is going to take that risk for you. Right. So you need, in order to have, in order

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to use Bitcoin in a way that has not shitty user experience, right? So on Lightning, on ArcSpark,

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whatever, on any of these L2s, you need these ancillary services. Maybe they're a company,

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maybe it's a centralized network, but you need them in order for that wallet to function.

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And no one is going to take that risk for you because no one wants to sit in a jail cell.

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Even if they're confident they're going to win on the law, they're not going to want to sit in

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the jail cell. No developer is going to do that, no wallet vendor, and these things just won't be

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available to americans and like and i cannot blame them i wouldn't want to sit in a jail cell

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like for that and and not even have the you know the like nothing is certain once once your freedom

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is stripped away and you were put behind bars i mean like we just saw you know ross olbrick finally

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made it out after so many years behind bars like nobody wants to be put in that cage and like the

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state does have that ability to exert violence on you and they will do it. Like it's just the

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reality. So with that kind of dark, dark preface to all of this, what OK, what's the bright side

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here in terms of this this Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act? Yeah. So we have a shot here to fix

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the law. So to Congress people, Representative Emmer, who is the majority whip. So that's the

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number two position on the Republican side of the House, for those who aren't familiar with their

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US civics. And Rep Torres, who is the Democrat from the Bronx, co-introduced the Blockchain

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Regulatory Certainty Act, which fixes the law. I mean, it's a super straightforward two-page bill.

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You can go read it. Anyone can read it. It's not complicated. You don't need a legal background

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to understand everything in there. It just says if you're not a custodian, you're not a money

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transmitter. You're not regulated as such. You're not regulated as any of this nonsense.

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And so we need to put pressure on them. We need to call our Congress people. We need to say, look,

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we need this to pass. And that means we have to work with our friends or more often enemies

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on the crypto side of the house, not the Bitcoin side. And we need to get them pushing it. And they

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are. We need to work with our friends in Congress and lobbyists who support us. And they are pushing

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on this too. But ultimately, we need the politicians to feel pressure from the voters.

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People need to pick up the phone and call their representatives. I know it sounds cliche,

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but it does work. It takes five minutes of your time. You just go to saveourwellness.org,

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you type in your zip code, it'll pull up all the phone numbers for you. You know,

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you've got two senators and a house member, you hit all three of them, you just pick up the phone,

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you say, Hi, if you haven't heard of the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, I think it's really

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important that fixes some issues in the law where there's regulations that people cannot possibly

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comply with, and they shouldn't be subject to jail time in exchange for not complying with

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something they can't comply with. And then you hang up the phone, you go about your day.

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And they listen. They do feel most senators and representatives don't have good information about what their constituents want. And most of them want to turn their place in Congress into a lifetime career, for better or for worse. They want to stay there forever.

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And so if you tell them, look, you vote yes on this or I'm not going to vote for you, they do listen.

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If they see, you know, 10, 20, 30, 40 people calling in, they're like, oh, actually, a lot of people care about this.

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It doesn't take much because not that many people actually do it.

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Not many people pick up the phone and call.

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It's very true.

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And it's like if they see that there are highly motivated people who are taking that five minutes, even though it's easy, you're right.

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most people just don't even take that step because there's honestly not that many things

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that most people care about enough to take that step.

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And so it's like it can actually move the needle.

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They will pay attention because honestly, I feel that with politicians, it's like they

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have so many people asking them for so many things all the time.

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They need to have a way to filter that.

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Usually the way to filter things is, okay, how many people are complaining about this?

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Like how big of a problem is this going to be for me down the road?

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is this an economically uh important group of people who are also complaining about this

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they can probably logically make some assumptions there um so i i would encourage people again just

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to go to save our wallets.org and to check this out it's a really uh nice little uh little site

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as well here but it breaks it down the bill is linked there it's it's all uh pretty as you said

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i mean it's a super short bill i had it up here earlier but it's like literally like two pages

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And so can you break down just like for the bill? I mean, how does this actually protect developers?

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Like, is this something that if it's if it's passed through, does this actually offer the kind of protections that are needed?

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Yeah, I mean, it really it's super clear and pretty comprehensive.

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It says very explicitly and it has a legal definition of what non-custodial means.

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But it's pretty good. It's pretty reasonable definition.

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I think it passes the smell test of what people understand non-custodial to mean.

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But it says very explicitly, if you are a service provider or a software developer, and there may be one other category, and you are non-custodial, then you are not subject to money transmission laws.

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You are not considered a money transmitter as defined in federal law, and you're not a financial institution.

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So you're not regulated as a financial institution, i.e. you don't have to do all the AML, KYC and stuff.

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It doesn't protect people from sanctions. There's like one or two other things that are strict, but that you can actually comply with and that, you know, you hope prosecutors will be reasonable about.

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But things that you actually could comply with, if you're like an LSP, you could not open channels to people in Iran.

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Right. It'd be great if we didn't have that those rules, but we're not fixing that.

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But it does fix very specifically the samurai case where they were charged with money transmission.

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They were also charged with money laundering, but that charge is harder without the transmission case.

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Money laundering is a weird thing. You normally have to charge someone with a crime and then money laundering on top.

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Just charging money laundering is harder.

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But for the most, you know, unless that's a thing you're doing and like running a mixer, running a mixer might still be challenging.

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But non-custodial wallets very specifically, you're not a money transmitter.

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You're not a financial institution.

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And that's really the thing that people are worried about.

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That's why Phoenix left the United States after the samurai charges.

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And that's why LSPs aren't as plentiful as they should be.

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We'd have a lot more competition for non-custodial Lightning wallets if we had this kind of protection.

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Frankly, I've looked into running an LSP for people.

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Not that I have buckets of Bitcoin, but enough that I could run an LSP at least for developers to test on and whatnot.

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And without this, I'm not comfortable doing it.

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But with this, I'm very comfortable running an LSP.

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and and and like the the tldr on this is basically this line right here that's you're not going to be

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uh designated as you know any of these things unless you have control over digital assets to

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which a user is entitled under the blockchain service or the software created maintained or

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disseminated by the blockchain developer or provider so basically if you're not in control

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of user funds you're good that's that's essentially what it boils down to right that's it yeah that's

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That's really all it is. It's not a complicated bill, straightforward, and it protects developers and wallet vendors against a very specific and a very real threat that they're worried about.

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269
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yeah i mean and to me this just seems like such a common sense thing like it seems that the the

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biden doj was just i mean being very almost just like malicious like this was this seems like one

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of those cases where it's like we're gonna make an example of you so you best not do it again

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unless you want to end up like these guys totally yeah i mean it's you know there were definitely

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a number of groups within the Biden administration who thought that crypto and Bitcoin, which of

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course they considered all to be one thing, were bad, should be destroyed, and we should use

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anything at our disposal to do so. Gensler at the SEC, obviously that didn't affect Bitcoin as much,

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but here in the DOJ, they were really coming after Bitcoin as well. And we don't know what

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the next administration is going to bring. It might be that again, right? So we need to

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try to front run it a little bit, keep it from happening. And we just need to make clear to

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the Senate and to our Congress people that this is a priority. Maybe they would pass if it got a

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vote, but it's hard to get a vote. We have to make sure that they know that this is worth their very

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limited floor time to debate this, bring it up and bring it to a vote, either individually or as

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part of a larger package. But either way, we need to all make sure that they hear us.

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i think the difficult thing that people need to understand too is that it's like precedent that is

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set now becomes a huge pain in the ass forever like essentially so if if we don't like now is

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when it's easier to fight back against these things from a regulatory standpoint because it's

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still kind of like people are still figuring it out yeah but one of the ways they figure it out

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is by setting precedent and if all of this goes through kind of unchallenged then it's like well

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okay, this is just how we treat this stuff now. So, you know, any of you, you like, we're just

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going to toss you unlicensed money transmitters into jail. And I mean, I think the frustrating

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thing about this is like, as a citizen, like you want there to be as much innovation as possible,

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as many companies building cool and, you know, useful products for you to use as possible.

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This kind of treatment of open source developers and non-custodial wallet developers, it literally

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just all it makes them do is do what phoenix did like okay we're gonna leave then like we're not

294
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gonna go risk jail time and i think that's like that's such a shame like that's not the environment

295
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we should be fostering like nobody nobody nobody wants that environment no one i mean except for

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maybe some like people suffering from a totalitarian temptation that they can't quite

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explain they're like they're in their elizabeth warren phase and they're just like i need to suck

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all the freedom out of the room as fast as possible i don't know i don't understand people

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who want to drive all the crypto assets and Bitcoin into custodial platforms so that they

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can be controlled that way.

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You know, if it limits non-custodial platforms, everyone's going to go to Coinbase.

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And to your point earlier about, you know, getting the president right right now, I think

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it's important to recognize that a lot of countries tend to follow the U.S. when it

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comes to their regulatory approach.

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So if the U.S. says, screw this non-custodial thing, we're going to ban this, we're going

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to make it really hard to have a good non-custodial wallet, well, a lot of other countries are

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going to look at that and say, oh, look, the US did that.

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This makes sense.

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We're going to do the same.

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And so it's not just the US.

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Obviously, Europe's already trying that, and they're all way down that road.

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But many other countries will follow what the US does here.

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And so if we take a stand and say, no, no, no, non-custodial is fine.

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Custodial will regulate.

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that gets monitored very closely, whatever, but non-custodial is fine, then that will probably

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take hold across a decent portion of the globe. Yeah. I mean, I hope that it does because again,

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it's so much of this stuff just seems like it should be common sense. It seems like this

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shouldn't even be a debate. Like, of course, if you're not controlling any sort of customer funds

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or, you know, user funds, of course, you're not, shouldn't be slapped with these ridiculous,

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you know uh legal categorizations but apparently it's very non-obvious to people or they pretend

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that it's non-obvious either way i i'm i'm curious to say i mean i saw just uh right before we hopped

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on here i saw that like all of the different basically uh both bitcoin and crypto kind of

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advocacy groups or you know uh policy groups have basically joined together to issue some

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some statements around this which is nice to see like that yeah i mean you know granted it's like

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00:27:11,888 --> 00:27:19,228
okay you know don't shit coin it's bad for you but it's not like ultimately this the fact that

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these laws uh or these actions do affect everyone building in this space at least hopefully some of

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that you know sweet uh sweet shit coin money uh flows through the lobbying channels and maybe

328
00:27:30,788 --> 00:27:35,088
benefits bitcoin in some way so at least there's that right they spend a lot of money on lobbying

329
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and we we as bitcoiners don't and they spend a lot of money lobbying about the sec and then

330
00:27:40,288 --> 00:27:45,048
securities regs and whatever and we don't care about that that doesn't help us and so it's it is

331
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nice to get a little bit of their money and a little bit of the the air in the room going towards

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00:27:49,188 --> 00:27:57,368
something that affects all of us including bitcoin yeah it's it's it's uh a nice a nice change of

333
00:27:57,368 --> 00:28:04,868
pace versus just them trying to fund uh bitcoin smear campaigns um so i mean yeah right uh but

334
00:28:04,868 --> 00:28:09,068
hey at least the this i mean it was i did not know if i was you know going to get to see the skull of

335
00:28:09,068 --> 00:28:14,128
satoshi in person but that was that was pretty cool not cool that they did it and like screw them

336
00:28:14,128 --> 00:28:18,968
for it and i will never forgive or forget uh because you just pre-mined all of your tokens

337
00:28:18,968 --> 00:28:24,188
out of thin air then use it to fund disinformation campaigns when you dump on retail but at least we

338
00:28:24,188 --> 00:28:30,148
got that cool piece of art because like shout out to the artist uh incredible piece of art yeah true

339
00:28:30,148 --> 00:28:37,588
true um and fuck you brad garlinghouse uh but anyway uh but that's beside the point uh so okay

340
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Is there anything else on this in terms of like are any kind of like other deadlines people should be aware of?

341
00:28:44,228 --> 00:28:45,948
Is there anything that like actionable stuff?

342
00:28:46,028 --> 00:28:48,148
Just I want to make sure we like we really drain this.

343
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If there's anything else you like want people to know on this.

344
00:28:50,768 --> 00:28:52,768
No, I mean, I think, you know, we want to get this done.

345
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This Congress, obviously, you know, who knows what will happen in the midterms in another year and a half.

346
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So, you know, we want to we want Congress to feel the pressure now.

347
00:29:01,488 --> 00:29:02,388
We wanted to get it done.

348
00:29:02,388 --> 00:29:06,268
But, yeah, I mean, I think it's the most important thing happening in Bitcoin right now.

349
00:29:06,268 --> 00:29:11,548
certainly the most important thing that that everyone in bitcoin can contribute to by again

350
00:29:11,548 --> 00:29:18,668
by picking up the phone and calling their reps um but yeah i i don't uh but i think that's i think

351
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that's about it even though it's it's super important it's just not a complicated issue

352
00:29:22,568 --> 00:29:28,508
right which which is nice like it's easy to wrap your head around okay so so that that's actually

353
00:29:28,508 --> 00:29:32,968
kind of a perfect uh a perfect transition here because you said this is like the most important

354
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thing happening right now. There are obviously a lot of debates going on within the Bitcoin

355
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community right now, if we can call it that. Presumably then, just given your last statement,

356
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you would say that those other debates are not as important as this one. I'm very curious what you

357
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think as far as what is the signal right now versus what is the noise amongst these various

358
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debates that are going on, whether it be around filtering and this, you know, knots versus core,

359
00:30:03,668 --> 00:30:09,208
which I think is somewhat of a false dichotomy. But or if it's about perhaps the most important

360
00:30:09,208 --> 00:30:15,968
thing is sats versus bits versus just, you know, versus Bitcoin. I don't know if to me,

361
00:30:15,968 --> 00:30:21,428
that's not the most important thing. I enjoy sats, but also, you know, call them whatever you want,

362
00:30:21,428 --> 00:30:27,768
label label them in your app however you want what what else are what are people being distracted by

363
00:30:27,768 --> 00:30:34,088
versus what else should they maybe pay attention to a little bit yeah yeah i mean i think on the

364
00:30:34,088 --> 00:30:41,708
yeah you're right on the filtering debate it's a weird dichotomy it's it's a 10 year old debate now

365
00:30:41,708 --> 00:30:48,668
probably more um so i'll admit that i'm a little tired of it um i've i've had it a few times i know

366
00:30:48,668 --> 00:30:53,148
there's a lot of Bitcoiners who this is their first go around. So they're excited by it, but

367
00:30:53,148 --> 00:30:59,528
I'm a little tired. You know, yeah, I don't think I think a lot has been written there. I think

368
00:30:59,528 --> 00:31:10,148
Bitcoin Core has a PR up to put up a blog post that explains, I think, in very clear terms,

369
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the way the mempool works from their point of view. And I think it is super straightforward

370
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and easy to understand.

371
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So when that comes out,

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I encourage people strongly to go read that.

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Hopefully, hopefully they'll post it

374
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in the next day or two.

375
00:31:25,368 --> 00:31:27,448
And I don't know that I have a lot more

376
00:31:27,448 --> 00:31:28,368
to add on that debate.

377
00:31:28,508 --> 00:31:31,588
But yeah, I mean, I think it's such a distraction.

378
00:31:32,768 --> 00:31:34,728
There's no amount of screaming about that

379
00:31:34,728 --> 00:31:36,428
is going to change anything.

380
00:31:37,188 --> 00:31:39,028
It's just, it is what it is,

381
00:31:39,088 --> 00:31:40,208
whether you like it or not.

382
00:31:40,388 --> 00:31:42,008
No amount of screaming is going to change it.

383
00:31:43,068 --> 00:31:45,068
And no amount of Bitcoin core changes

384
00:31:45,068 --> 00:31:47,008
is going to change reality there either.

385
00:31:47,308 --> 00:31:51,408
It just kind of is what it is. So I find that to be quite a distraction.

386
00:31:52,428 --> 00:31:57,548
On BitSats and Bitcoin, I don't know, man.

387
00:32:02,668 --> 00:32:05,888
I think the ship has sailed, but people are going to push it anyway.

388
00:32:06,348 --> 00:32:14,528
Certainly, I have always held the view that more experimentation in user experiences built around Bitcoin is good.

389
00:32:14,528 --> 00:32:21,348
that is part of the way we look to achieve our mission at Spiral.

390
00:32:21,888 --> 00:32:27,608
We want to provide software that enables people to build a great non-custodial wallet,

391
00:32:27,828 --> 00:32:30,868
and that enables more experimentation of different user experiences

392
00:32:30,868 --> 00:32:34,148
to see what resonates with people and what gets people really using Bitcoin.

393
00:32:36,028 --> 00:32:40,448
And, you know, I mean, our goal is that hopefully by the end of the year,

394
00:32:40,548 --> 00:32:43,228
if not the middle of next year, you will be able to go on Replit,

395
00:32:43,228 --> 00:32:52,028
ask it to build you a Bitcoin wallet, and it's going to build you a super slick, non-custodial Bitcoin wallet that works, has instant payments, low fees, and is super reliable.

396
00:32:52,748 --> 00:32:57,148
And you can build whatever user experience you want, and then we can see what actually works in the marketplace.

397
00:32:57,968 --> 00:32:59,628
That's our top line goal right now.

398
00:33:00,428 --> 00:33:01,468
So I'm excited for that.

399
00:33:02,948 --> 00:33:10,208
But yeah, I mean, sheesh, on bits and sats and whatever, I don't know, man.

400
00:33:10,228 --> 00:33:11,628
I'm not a user experience person.

401
00:33:11,628 --> 00:33:15,288
And it does seem like the fragmenting the user experience is only worse.

402
00:33:15,428 --> 00:33:16,408
But hey, what do I know?

403
00:33:17,628 --> 00:33:17,908
Yeah.

404
00:33:17,908 --> 00:33:21,768
And what about are there any other topics?

405
00:33:21,888 --> 00:33:29,288
I mean, that you think are, again, are worthy of consideration right now when it comes to

406
00:33:29,288 --> 00:33:32,528
like these internal debates that Bitcoiners have?

407
00:33:33,308 --> 00:33:35,308
I mean, there's a lot going on in Bitcoin.

408
00:33:36,828 --> 00:33:40,928
I think that the debates are very often not the point.

409
00:33:40,928 --> 00:33:45,548
Like, you know, there's always a lot of debates going on in Bitcoin about this or that or whatever.

410
00:33:46,388 --> 00:33:51,708
In general, I find them to almost always be distractions like that.

411
00:33:51,828 --> 00:33:54,188
You know, certainly the block size wars was not a distraction.

412
00:33:54,748 --> 00:33:57,328
That was that was really about how to define Bitcoin.

413
00:33:57,328 --> 00:34:04,308
And there was a lot of as painful as it was, there was a lot of value in having that debate and pushing through those wars.

414
00:34:04,688 --> 00:34:08,108
But for the most part, I think most debates in Bitcoin tend to be a distraction.

415
00:34:08,108 --> 00:34:13,288
but there is a lot going on in bitcoin there's all there's more developers building bitcoin

416
00:34:13,288 --> 00:34:19,408
applications than there ever have been there continues to be a very slow but non-trivial

417
00:34:19,408 --> 00:34:26,808
growth in available resources for developers and funding for developers tons of new protocols and

418
00:34:26,808 --> 00:34:33,188
things coming out whether it's roll-ups and l2s whatever you think of some of those going in the

419
00:34:33,188 --> 00:34:36,788
shit coining on bitcoin direction some of them going in the in the providing better privacy

420
00:34:36,788 --> 00:34:44,468
direction though uh which is cool or arc and other new l2s that aren't roll-up based plus i think

421
00:34:44,468 --> 00:34:50,128
lightning is finally getting good this year i mentioned earlier but i i really think the

422
00:34:50,128 --> 00:34:55,808
non-custodial lightning wallets that are going to ship in the middle of next year based on the work

423
00:34:55,808 --> 00:35:00,988
we do on ldk at spiral are going to be really really good i mean i know a lot of people wrote

424
00:35:00,988 --> 00:35:06,768
off lightning for a lot of very good reasons uh non-custodial lightning has sucked but it's it's

425
00:35:06,768 --> 00:35:15,008
It's getting there and we finally do have a lot of the pieces in place and will have the pieces in place over the next few months to really make it awesome.

426
00:35:17,188 --> 00:35:20,828
So there's a lot of really great work being done.

427
00:35:21,308 --> 00:35:28,968
It's just that a lot of the plebs, either people who are developers or maybe more importantly, just don't have a ton of time.

428
00:35:29,108 --> 00:35:30,188
This isn't their full time job.

429
00:35:30,268 --> 00:35:32,648
They don't have a ton of time to contribute to Bitcoin.

430
00:35:34,168 --> 00:35:36,408
Don't really get to help with some of these things.

431
00:35:36,408 --> 00:35:45,528
And so a lot of people want to just have debates because it's very understandable and it's easy and you can feel like you're doing something and not sure that you always are.

432
00:35:47,208 --> 00:35:54,548
Well, let's I'd love to dig into the lightning piece a little bit, because, again, that that talk you gave and I'll link it in the show notes for people.

433
00:35:54,628 --> 00:35:56,708
I'm sure I can find it on YouTube.

434
00:35:57,508 --> 00:36:01,508
But basically, yeah, lightning screwed, but it's not screwed, but it's it's it's screwed.

435
00:36:01,508 --> 00:36:07,368
but it's okay uh can how maybe if you could give the just like the high level premise for that

436
00:36:07,368 --> 00:36:14,248
talk like what led you to give it and then kind of how has your view of lightning either evolved

437
00:36:14,248 --> 00:36:22,468
or shifted or changed since then yeah um i think when i gave that talk oh you said 2022 is probably

438
00:36:22,468 --> 00:36:27,948
something around then uh i think so probably uh i think lightning was a little overhyped

439
00:36:27,948 --> 00:36:32,308
there was a lot of like lightning is perfect lightning is super secure you're on a node you

440
00:36:32,308 --> 00:36:37,908
don't have to worry about it whatever whatever um and i think there were a lot of very big open

441
00:36:37,908 --> 00:36:41,668
hairy questions about lightning including in the security model including the trust model

442
00:36:41,668 --> 00:36:47,228
um i think many times in that talk i told people like you probably should never open a channel with

443
00:36:47,228 --> 00:36:52,668
someone you don't trust um at least kind of trust you know you don't have to like think they're the

444
00:36:52,668 --> 00:36:56,648
the best person in the world but they're at least not going to go to a lot of effort to take your

445
00:36:56,648 --> 00:37:04,208
money um and i think since then the communities come around the other way and now lightning sucks

446
00:37:04,208 --> 00:37:08,988
lightning is broken lightning will never grow it's just a way for custodial platforms to settle

447
00:37:08,988 --> 00:37:16,068
money and then maybe it's a a way for other l2s that people actually use to settle um you know

448
00:37:16,068 --> 00:37:20,828
whether it's you're using e-cash or spark or arc or whatever you're gonna pay people over lightning

449
00:37:20,828 --> 00:37:29,968
I'm gonna you know pull a little bit of a cliche and and pretend that my view hasn't shifted I've

450
00:37:29,968 --> 00:37:33,528
been rock solid and the community was here and the other community is here and I'm still chilling

451
00:37:33,528 --> 00:37:39,908
in the middle but I think you know a lot of the stuff that that was in that talk to you was

452
00:37:39,908 --> 00:37:46,348
here's a big problem it's really hairy we think we have a solution kind of right here

453
00:37:46,348 --> 00:37:50,348
and we have to figure it out and we have to go build it and it's a lot of work to build it

454
00:37:50,348 --> 00:38:00,848
And now for many of them, not everything, but for many of those big hairy problems, we do have solutions and we have them built or almost built.

455
00:38:01,788 --> 00:38:06,628
You know, the biggest one really being these pinning attacks.

456
00:38:06,868 --> 00:38:15,628
So Lightning has this like really weird OG Lightning has this really weird trust model where, you know, we're creating all these transactions, but we're not broadcasting them right away.

457
00:38:15,628 --> 00:38:19,528
That's like classic Lightning. We're creating these transactions. We're updating them all the time.

458
00:38:19,528 --> 00:38:21,328
and then eventually we'll broadcast it later.

459
00:38:21,988 --> 00:38:24,648
The problem is we've got to put a fee on that transaction.

460
00:38:25,288 --> 00:38:27,768
You know, we're building these transactions every minute or whatever.

461
00:38:28,088 --> 00:38:32,288
We're assigning a fee and that fee needs to be sufficient to get into a block

462
00:38:32,288 --> 00:38:34,848
at some point in the future that we don't yet know.

463
00:38:35,308 --> 00:38:38,788
And obviously, if you follow Bitcoin fee estimates or you go to Mempool,

464
00:38:39,248 --> 00:38:42,688
Mempool.netspace every now and again, you notice that the fee does fluctuate.

465
00:38:42,748 --> 00:38:44,088
And sometimes the fee fluctuates a lot.

466
00:38:44,088 --> 00:39:06,028
Sometimes the fees spike up, you know, hundreds, 100x over one day because somebody is doing something crazy and they put a lot of transactions on the chain. So creating transactions that have a fixed fee rate now for inclusion in the chain some point later where we don't know what the fee rate is going to be, then is not a solvable problem. It's not just a hard problem. It's like we can't solve it.

467
00:39:06,028 --> 00:39:24,528
And over the course of the last four or five years, Lightning has done some work at changing the protocol, but also Bitcoin Core has rethought how they deal with transactions in the mempool to address this problem for Lightning.

468
00:39:24,708 --> 00:39:28,368
And it also fixes problems for other related problems for other L2s.

469
00:39:28,368 --> 00:39:44,688
And so Bitcoin Core now, as of, I think the latest release, maybe the one before it, when you take a transaction, when nodes send transactions to each other, you know, that you're sending a transaction, they're like, okay, I got this transaction, I'm going to see if I want to put it in my mempool, and then relay it onwards.

470
00:39:45,348 --> 00:39:48,968
Now, nodes are able to look at multiple transactions at once.

471
00:39:49,228 --> 00:40:08,555
So a node is able to say hey Walker you know your peer can say hey Walker hey I got some transactions for you Instead of sending one it sends two And now your node can look at those two transactions and can say okay I going to look at the overall fee rate of both of the transactions together and not just one at a time

472
00:40:09,275 --> 00:40:19,196
And that lets us play fun games like assigning zero fee on these transactions in Lightning that we update all the time and then hanging another transaction off of them that pays for them.

473
00:40:19,936 --> 00:40:22,495
And so this second transaction can have a high fee.

474
00:40:22,595 --> 00:40:23,775
It pays for that transaction.

475
00:40:23,775 --> 00:40:31,635
But nodes have to relay them together so that nodes can say, OK, these two transactions together make sense, even if the first one didn't.

476
00:40:32,356 --> 00:40:34,015
And that's a huge change.

477
00:40:34,175 --> 00:40:40,515
You know, as you might imagine, there's a lot of parts of Bitcoin Core involved in looking at transactions when they get added to the mempool.

478
00:40:41,175 --> 00:40:47,916
To be able to now look at buckets of transactions instead of singular transactions was a lot of work, a lot of research and development.

479
00:40:47,916 --> 00:40:53,655
a lot of thinking about all kinds of crazy denial of service attacks a lot of thinking about ways

480
00:40:53,655 --> 00:41:00,035
people could break these things and it took two three four years for bitcoin core to finally

481
00:41:00,035 --> 00:41:04,275
conclude some of that work some of it's still ongoing there's more work to be done there

482
00:41:04,275 --> 00:41:09,635
but you know fixing these things was hard and so i think the point of the talk was to point out like

483
00:41:09,635 --> 00:41:15,175
these things are hard we might have solutions for some of them some of them we might not have

484
00:41:15,175 --> 00:41:19,495
solutions for some of them are unsolvable most of them we can fix but there's a lot of work to be

485
00:41:19,495 --> 00:41:24,936
done and i think now we're in a position where we can say okay actually we've done most of the work

486
00:41:24,936 --> 00:41:32,275
we needed to do it's not 100 there but over the next i think six to 12 months it's going to be

487
00:41:32,275 --> 00:41:40,416
mostly there um not in all lightning nodes uh but certainly in ldk and for the folks using ldk

488
00:41:40,416 --> 00:41:47,255
based wallets those features that we needed to make lightning good are finally there

489
00:41:47,255 --> 00:41:54,795
which is which is great uh like the fact that you like to hear your positivity on it is is

490
00:41:54,795 --> 00:41:59,715
fantastic because again like uh what i enjoy about you matt is that you're always very

491
00:41:59,715 --> 00:42:05,295
realistic and balanced about things like no one would accuse you of overly hyping something you

492
00:42:05,295 --> 00:42:11,495
know to put it mildly uh so so that i mean that's fantastic and i do think that it is funny

493
00:42:11,495 --> 00:42:17,376
now that you kind of pointed out like i'm remembering in kind of that 2022 era where

494
00:42:17,376 --> 00:42:21,635
it was a lot more talk about how great lightning was and lightning is like it is ready and it's

495
00:42:21,635 --> 00:42:27,876
good to go and you know it's perfect and and it wasn't and now it's kind of like you hear there's

496
00:42:27,876 --> 00:42:33,635
a lot of like lightning like doomerism now and just people you know trying to dunk on lightning

497
00:42:33,635 --> 00:42:40,956
when it from just a as a casual user of lightning and of a bunch of different lightning wallets in a

498
00:42:40,956 --> 00:42:46,575
lot of different contexts it's pretty incredible now and like from what you're saying like it's

499
00:42:46,575 --> 00:42:53,655
going to get better like it's it's it's it's funny how uh how narratives change i guess but

500
00:42:53,655 --> 00:42:58,835
i'm i'm glad to see it under hyped then i guess currently maybe that's a good thing a little a

501
00:42:58,835 --> 00:43:04,715
little bit less hype uh is is not going to be bad yeah and it'll take a while as wallets start to

502
00:43:04,715 --> 00:43:10,356
adopt the newer technologies i mean i think you know over the next few months uh the good lightning

503
00:43:10,356 --> 00:43:15,015
wallets are going to get really good and the ones that maybe aren't as actively maintained or

504
00:43:15,015 --> 00:43:22,956
made some technical decisions that are harder for them to to pivot are gonna stay okay um but over

505
00:43:22,956 --> 00:43:28,936
the next you know as they all start to catch up it's it's gonna be i think really good i think

506
00:43:28,936 --> 00:43:34,376
the user experience is finally going to be great and and hopefully just like more options because

507
00:43:34,376 --> 00:43:39,416
i mean for a while even like a like wallet of satoshi was such a widely used wallet um and then

508
00:43:39,416 --> 00:43:44,175
they obviously they're a custodial wallet to clarify for anyone who is not familiar and they

509
00:43:44,175 --> 00:43:48,615
left they ceased operating i mean you could you could still access the wallet if you were using a

510
00:43:48,615 --> 00:43:53,015
VPN, like, you know, it was fine. But like, for all intents and purposes, they were not available

511
00:43:53,015 --> 00:43:57,416
to folks in the US, you know, because they were worried, again, about the whole money transmitter

512
00:43:57,416 --> 00:44:03,115
thing. Now they're coming back, they're saying we've got a non custodial option. I don't know

513
00:44:03,115 --> 00:44:06,655
if you have any thoughts on that. But just more broadly, it's like, okay, it's nice for people

514
00:44:06,655 --> 00:44:10,995
to have more than just like one option. Like, we should have a bunch of custodial options and a

515
00:44:10,995 --> 00:44:17,095
bunch of non custodial options. And you should be able to easily choose. And they should be and

516
00:44:17,095 --> 00:44:21,615
they should be nice experiences versus like, well, here's the one custodial option that we can still

517
00:44:21,615 --> 00:44:26,315
use. And, oh, you can get a hold of this non-custodial one if you want, but the developers

518
00:44:26,315 --> 00:44:32,075
fled. So like, who knows? Like, I don't know. It feels like we're in a better place now for that,

519
00:44:32,235 --> 00:44:34,715
at least. But do you have any thoughts on the wallet of Satoshi thing?

520
00:44:35,135 --> 00:44:41,515
Yeah. I mean, the BRCA is needed here. And again, you know, our goal on Spiral is really that we

521
00:44:41,515 --> 00:44:50,416
We want everyone to be able to YOLO a good, secure, non-custodial wallet with an LLM and Replit and just build me my own non-custodial wallet.

522
00:44:50,575 --> 00:44:55,055
And it'll be good. That's our goal. By the middle of next year, that's really our goal is that it'll just work.

523
00:44:55,215 --> 00:44:57,476
It'll be great. And we'll have real competition there.

524
00:44:58,075 --> 00:45:09,095
On wallet of Satoshi specifically, my speculation, and I haven't gotten this confirmed, is that they're using Spark,

525
00:45:09,095 --> 00:45:21,555
which is LightSpark's new not custodial but also not non-custodial Bitcoin L2.

526
00:45:22,356 --> 00:45:24,856
So it's a really interesting product.

527
00:45:25,155 --> 00:45:26,315
I think it's really cool.

528
00:45:27,055 --> 00:45:30,595
And for low balances, I think it makes a lot of sense.

529
00:45:30,815 --> 00:45:34,795
For a balance where you can't really open a non-custodial wallet, it makes a lot of sense.

530
00:45:35,815 --> 00:45:37,715
But it is fully trusted.

531
00:45:37,715 --> 00:45:48,775
So it's this really weird dynamic where you trust their server to delete keys so that, you know, as you transact, they're deleting old keys and you trust them to do that.

532
00:45:48,835 --> 00:45:52,015
And if they don't do that, then they can potentially take your money.

533
00:45:52,856 --> 00:45:55,976
But if they do do that, they're not a custodian.

534
00:45:56,055 --> 00:46:02,635
They don't have an active key on their server that someone could hack into, take the key and then take your money.

535
00:46:02,635 --> 00:46:09,635
right so it's not it has a very different trust model in practice so it isn't practice much safer

536
00:46:09,635 --> 00:46:13,995
but it is still fully trusted you're still trusting their server to do the thing correctly

537
00:46:13,995 --> 00:46:23,155
and uh yeah so it's it's somewhere kind of in the middle yeah i mean it's definitely not custodial

538
00:46:23,155 --> 00:46:26,815
because they don't have a key that has some money that they could get hacked or whatever

539
00:46:26,815 --> 00:46:33,095
But it's not non-custodial either because you don't have the key.

540
00:46:33,235 --> 00:46:35,775
You don't have the only right to your money either.

541
00:46:37,195 --> 00:46:38,495
It's somewhere in the middle.

542
00:46:38,635 --> 00:46:39,735
It's a weird middle ground.

543
00:46:39,956 --> 00:46:41,095
But it's a really cool middle ground.

544
00:46:41,215 --> 00:46:42,896
It's cool that people can build a middle ground.

545
00:46:42,896 --> 00:46:51,916
And then on top of that, I think on the Spiral team, we similarly are looking at using Spark for some things.

546
00:46:51,916 --> 00:46:59,315
and very specifically our goal over the next number of months is to start thinking about what

547
00:46:59,315 --> 00:47:04,635
a wallet looks like when you have both a custodial or at least this trusted thing and a non-custodial

548
00:47:04,635 --> 00:47:10,015
option because you know if your wallet only has a thousand sats if you opened a new wallet you

549
00:47:10,015 --> 00:47:17,515
linked your nostor uh and you received a 21 sat zap you can't there's not no no non-custodial

550
00:47:17,515 --> 00:47:22,535
wallet makes sense. You can't have 21 sats in a non-custodial wallet, even with an LSP. They're

551
00:47:22,535 --> 00:47:28,615
not going to allocate money into that channel. It doesn't make sense. And so you need something

552
00:47:28,615 --> 00:47:33,675
custodial there, or at least trusted. And Spark is a really cool option because it's not really

553
00:47:33,675 --> 00:47:38,416
custodial. And it doesn't have that really bad trust model of like they could get hacked and the

554
00:47:38,416 --> 00:47:42,715
money taken. But it is still fully trusted. So we're not going to call it non-custodial.

555
00:47:42,715 --> 00:47:50,356
um and then if you get a decent balance if you get you know 10 000 sats or whatever the threshold is

556
00:47:50,356 --> 00:47:55,476
for you know the wallet could pick a different threshold um you open a line a channel and you go

557
00:47:55,476 --> 00:47:59,755
to an lsp and you say hey look i've already got this money i don't need you to allocate any liquidity

558
00:47:59,755 --> 00:48:05,755
to me just open a channel to me and i'll put this money in my channel um and so it it really makes

559
00:48:05,755 --> 00:48:09,735
for a nice wallet across different balances.

560
00:48:10,195 --> 00:48:11,795
So you don't have to like pick,

561
00:48:12,035 --> 00:48:14,275
oh, well, I'm going to have low balance.

562
00:48:14,275 --> 00:48:16,115
So I need to pick a custodial wallet

563
00:48:16,115 --> 00:48:18,095
or, oh, I'm going to have, you know,

564
00:48:19,476 --> 00:48:20,896
a whole Bitcoin in there.

565
00:48:21,035 --> 00:48:23,035
So I'm going to, I need a non-custodial wallet

566
00:48:23,035 --> 00:48:24,615
because I don't want it to get stolen.

567
00:48:26,095 --> 00:48:28,795
It lets just one wallet service both roles.

568
00:48:28,896 --> 00:48:31,175
And okay, maybe if you have a thousand Bitcoin

569
00:48:31,175 --> 00:48:32,255
or a hundred Bitcoin,

570
00:48:32,356 --> 00:48:33,675
you're not going to use this kind of wallet.

571
00:48:33,675 --> 00:48:39,735
you hopefully have some kind of offline air gapped, whatever. But for a spending wallet,

572
00:48:39,735 --> 00:48:45,295
or for a wallet that only has some savings, I think it makes a lot of sense. And as Lightning

573
00:48:45,295 --> 00:48:49,995
continues to mature, and we address these issues that where the protocol bleeds into the user

574
00:48:49,995 --> 00:48:54,835
experience, and it leads to a really bad user experience, as we address these issues, then

575
00:48:54,835 --> 00:49:00,456
having this wallet with both sides is just going to be super seamless. You shouldn't have to notice

576
00:49:00,456 --> 00:49:05,956
any of this because lightning is going to be totally reliable on this side spark is going to

577
00:49:05,956 --> 00:49:10,295
be totally reliable on this side and the wallet's going to get you the best trust model that makes

578
00:49:10,295 --> 00:49:17,715
sense given your balance at all times and it's just going to work i feel like i kind of glossed

579
00:49:17,715 --> 00:49:21,735
over uh something that you mentioned earlier where basically you said we're like if i heard this

580
00:49:21,735 --> 00:49:26,235
correctly like six to twelve months away from like basically somebody like me being able to vibe code

581
00:49:26,235 --> 00:49:30,735
my own lightning wallet is that kind of what you were you were getting at basically like

582
00:49:30,735 --> 00:49:35,635
yeah that's really cool that's that's our goal that's definitely our goal and i'm not going to

583
00:49:35,635 --> 00:49:41,476
promise 12 months on that i'm in 12 months i think we're going to be there but i'm gonna i'm

584
00:49:41,476 --> 00:49:46,896
gonna say 18 months just because things slip um you know i think we're gonna have a really good

585
00:49:46,896 --> 00:49:52,916
product in the next 12 months certainly um whether it'll be good enough for you to just vibe code

586
00:49:52,916 --> 00:49:59,876
something and have it be secure and robust maybe certainly in 18 months you know by late summer of

587
00:49:59,876 --> 00:50:05,695
next year or fall of next year yeah yeah you're going to be able to vibe code your bitcoin wallet

588
00:50:05,695 --> 00:50:11,295
it's going to be a good wallet that's wild to think about i mean so do you envision a future

589
00:50:11,295 --> 00:50:17,615
where it's like there are innumerable different you know wallet implementations because everybody's

590
00:50:17,615 --> 00:50:22,615
building kind of a wallet that works or maybe not everybody is but more and more people are

591
00:50:22,615 --> 00:50:27,396
able to build out a wallet that has the functionality and the features that they are

592
00:50:27,396 --> 00:50:32,735
looking for like specifically or or do you think we still do these things sort of like you know is

593
00:50:32,735 --> 00:50:37,135
it like a winner take most where we still kind of trend towards like a couple of big players

594
00:50:37,135 --> 00:50:44,295
i assume there'll be a handful of big players i mean you know at some point there's some social

595
00:50:44,295 --> 00:50:49,416
value in like okay well this is the one that a bunch of people reviewed the code and it's not

596
00:50:49,416 --> 00:50:53,575
going to steal your money and whatever. If we really had a million of them and everyone was

597
00:50:53,575 --> 00:50:58,255
using their own, then half of them would steal everyone's money. And that's not a great outcome

598
00:50:58,255 --> 00:51:03,956
either. But aside from that, you know, I think, yeah, I mean, there's going to be quite a few.

599
00:51:04,495 --> 00:51:07,775
And I think it's what it's really going to do is it's going to enable a lot of experimentation.

600
00:51:07,775 --> 00:51:15,315
You know, if you are a hardcore bits maxi or a sats maxi or whatever, you can go build a wallet

601
00:51:15,315 --> 00:51:16,976
and say, look, look at this wallet.

602
00:51:17,115 --> 00:51:19,035
Look how great the user experience is.

603
00:51:19,595 --> 00:51:20,456
I can demo it.

604
00:51:20,535 --> 00:51:21,075
It works.

605
00:51:21,315 --> 00:51:22,255
It's super slick.

606
00:51:22,376 --> 00:51:23,755
It's as slick as all the other wallets.

607
00:51:23,755 --> 00:51:26,675
But look how great this feature of the wallet is

608
00:51:26,675 --> 00:51:29,376
where I think I'm really delivering a better user experience.

609
00:51:29,615 --> 00:51:31,495
And then it lets people build more innovative things.

610
00:51:31,595 --> 00:51:33,535
You know, let's allow us for more innovation to say,

611
00:51:33,735 --> 00:51:38,135
well, I think that there should be a Bitcoin wallet

612
00:51:38,135 --> 00:51:40,396
with a built-in chat bot

613
00:51:40,396 --> 00:51:43,275
and you pay for the chat bot with lightning or whatever.

614
00:51:43,275 --> 00:51:45,315
I mean, I know that's a common example now.

615
00:51:45,436 --> 00:51:46,315
I'm not an entrepreneur.

616
00:51:46,476 --> 00:51:51,856
I don't have a million ideas, but we're going to really enable people to experiment with

617
00:51:51,856 --> 00:51:53,356
all kinds of different clever things.

618
00:51:53,916 --> 00:51:57,956
And that's going to really unlock things in Bitcoin, I hope.

619
00:51:59,315 --> 00:52:04,175
Can I ask you, I don't know if I've actually heard the story and if you're cool with telling

620
00:52:04,175 --> 00:52:08,396
it, how did you actually get into developing in Bitcoin in the first place?

621
00:52:08,456 --> 00:52:09,815
Do you mind telling that story?

622
00:52:10,476 --> 00:52:10,715
Totally.

623
00:52:10,715 --> 00:52:12,476
I was in high school.

624
00:52:13,275 --> 00:52:22,936
wild and bitcoin got to the front page of slash dot a few times if you're not old enough to know

625
00:52:22,936 --> 00:52:30,376
what slash dot is slash dot was reddit before dig was reddit and it's dig with two g's um so there's

626
00:52:30,376 --> 00:52:34,476
there's been a few of these kind of link sharing sites throughout history and slash dot was the

627
00:52:34,476 --> 00:52:39,275
cool one at the time it was a little more tech focused bitcoin got to the front page a few times

628
00:52:39,275 --> 00:52:41,376
over the course of late 2010, early 2011.

629
00:52:42,575 --> 00:52:44,635
I ended up hearing about Bitcoin

630
00:52:44,635 --> 00:52:46,416
from a podcast that I watch regularly,

631
00:52:46,416 --> 00:52:48,055
but they heard about it from Slashdot.

632
00:52:48,155 --> 00:52:51,615
There was kind of a flood of technologist people

633
00:52:51,615 --> 00:52:53,155
who got involved in Bitcoin

634
00:52:53,155 --> 00:52:56,936
all at the same time in early 2011 to mid 2011.

635
00:52:57,916 --> 00:52:59,416
And I just found it fascinating.

636
00:52:59,595 --> 00:53:02,035
I mean, I didn't, I knew some things.

637
00:53:02,035 --> 00:53:03,135
I was a high school kid.

638
00:53:03,195 --> 00:53:04,515
I didn't really know how to code.

639
00:53:04,595 --> 00:53:06,476
I didn't really know whatever.

640
00:53:08,055 --> 00:53:08,795
I just,

641
00:53:09,275 --> 00:53:13,976
kind of thought this was really cool we could like build a money and like send each other money

642
00:53:13,976 --> 00:53:19,356
based on purely on the software that we were writing and not have to trust anyone else no

643
00:53:19,356 --> 00:53:24,115
one else was involved in us sending each other money and we were building this this money for

644
00:53:24,115 --> 00:53:29,956
the internet i thought that was really really cool and i wanted to work on it and luckily at the time

645
00:53:29,956 --> 00:53:35,655
a few other folks got involved in bitcoin at the same time who were just brilliant i mean who were

646
00:53:35,655 --> 00:53:52,956
You know, Greg Maxwell, Peter Willa, folks who were senior engineers, you know, had been doing software engineering for many, many years and were more than happy to volunteer their time to teach some random kid like me stuff about software engineering.

647
00:53:53,095 --> 00:53:55,396
And so I learned from super brilliant people.

648
00:53:55,515 --> 00:54:00,755
I got to hang out with super brilliant people on IRC and work on a project I thought was fascinating.

649
00:54:00,755 --> 00:54:17,835
So I kept doing that through college, during Blockstream out of college, did that for a few years during ChainCode. Now it's viral. So I've bounced around basically my whole career between positions doing Bitcoin research lab kind of stuff, just write good software to make Bitcoin better.

650
00:54:17,835 --> 00:54:22,876
i've been very fortunate enough to be paid to do that my entire career

651
00:54:22,876 --> 00:54:29,275
i guess probably more than five more more than a decade now i've been doing it full time

652
00:54:29,275 --> 00:54:35,416
and i've been working on bitcoin for almost 15 years that's that's wild oh happy almost

653
00:54:35,416 --> 00:54:41,376
anniversary uh thanks thanks for sharing that i mean that's just that's just very cool um i mean

654
00:54:41,376 --> 00:54:51,896
So you were not like – you were still a very – you were very green when it came to your developer skills when you first discovered Bitcoin and started trying to learn about it.

655
00:54:52,295 --> 00:54:55,735
Yeah, I have one of the best defenses for I'm not Satoshi.

656
00:54:55,916 --> 00:54:57,956
I didn't know what a pointer was in 2011.

657
00:54:58,255 --> 00:55:02,235
So I clearly did not write any of this code that is totally impossible.

658
00:55:03,436 --> 00:55:10,535
It's good to have plausible deniability these days because it seems the Satoshi accusations really get tossed around a lot.

659
00:55:10,535 --> 00:55:34,876
Yeah, it's it's absurd. Well, thank you again for sharing that because I want to ask another question of you based on another one of your talks, which was, again, this this pre Trump talk that you had, which is essentially around what I if I'm remembering correctly, what you viewed as one of the greatest, if not the greatest risks to Bitcoin, which is minor centralization, specifically mining pool centralization.

660
00:55:34,876 --> 00:55:39,495
Some of this, you know, basically we can get into the template side of that too.

661
00:55:40,015 --> 00:55:44,115
But have you seen any improvement in that since then?

662
00:55:44,335 --> 00:55:47,135
As far as I understand, the situation is still not very great.

663
00:55:47,235 --> 00:55:48,295
Where are you at with that?

664
00:55:49,476 --> 00:55:55,856
Is this still in your mind like one of the or if not the greatest like long term risk to Bitcoin?

665
00:55:57,195 --> 00:56:00,195
Yeah, it definitely is a major risk.

666
00:56:00,195 --> 00:56:03,916
It is definitely one of the biggest risks to Bitcoin, I think.

667
00:56:04,876 --> 00:56:10,976
I will say that we are starting to see little shoots of grass poke through the dirt here.

668
00:56:13,615 --> 00:56:28,135
So on the stratum, so the fundamental issue to set context is that in Bitcoin, the network, the thing that gives Bitcoin value is that there's this censorship resistance property.

669
00:56:28,315 --> 00:56:29,976
Like you own your Bitcoin.

670
00:56:30,495 --> 00:56:32,035
No one can take that from you.

671
00:56:32,035 --> 00:56:36,075
No one can stop you from sending your Bitcoin to whoever you want.

672
00:56:36,535 --> 00:56:38,515
And it is your Bitcoin.

673
00:56:38,635 --> 00:56:40,795
You don't have to trust anyone else in order to use it.

674
00:56:41,555 --> 00:56:53,936
And that's great unless there's, let's say, two pools that control more than 51% of the network or three that control something like 70 or 80%, right?

675
00:56:54,376 --> 00:56:55,615
Which is the case today.

676
00:56:55,615 --> 00:57:04,396
If you combine Antpool with all their proxies and then Foundry, it's almost more than 50%, it's close to 50%, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

677
00:57:05,175 --> 00:57:13,235
That's not good, and that can potentially impact this censorship resistance property, which I think is really a major part of where Bitcoin gets its value.

678
00:57:14,436 --> 00:57:16,976
So what does this mean?

679
00:57:17,155 --> 00:57:22,416
So it is not the case that this is fundamental to the design of a pool.

680
00:57:22,896 --> 00:57:25,235
A pool says, okay, we have all these miners.

681
00:57:25,456 --> 00:57:26,195
You're going to mine.

682
00:57:26,356 --> 00:57:28,035
We're only going to find a block every so often.

683
00:57:28,155 --> 00:57:31,396
We're going to split the reward of the block across all the miners proportional to their hash rate.

684
00:57:31,956 --> 00:57:33,295
This is a simple business.

685
00:57:33,295 --> 00:57:37,896
This does not require that they select the transactions that go in the block.

686
00:57:38,055 --> 00:57:43,856
That is a technical shortcut that was done because it's an easier way to implement this business, but that's not required.

687
00:57:43,856 --> 00:58:01,916
And so there have been various proposals throughout Bitcoin's history to remove that requirement to say, OK, we can have a pool where the individual miners are selecting the transactions and the pool still does this reward splitting thing.

688
00:58:02,775 --> 00:58:06,496
We now have a few pools that actually enable this.

689
00:58:06,675 --> 00:58:10,016
So there's Ocean, obviously, very publicly, which is Luke's pool.

690
00:58:10,476 --> 00:58:14,235
They don't have any kind of real material hash rate to speak of.

691
00:58:14,295 --> 00:58:15,516
There's a little bit of hash rate there.

692
00:58:15,936 --> 00:58:21,016
They've invented their own protocol, their own proprietary protocol for this that other pools don't use.

693
00:58:21,315 --> 00:58:24,695
But it does enable this, and that's really good for Bitcoin's decentralization.

694
00:58:25,035 --> 00:58:34,876
There's also Stratum v2, which is a slightly older protocol standard that I wrote with the Brains, which is the former slush pool company.

695
00:58:35,496 --> 00:58:38,675
CEO and CTO were co-authors on that.

696
00:58:38,675 --> 00:58:46,135
they for business reasons don't currently allow miners to select their own transactions sadly

697
00:58:46,135 --> 00:58:53,335
at brains but there's a new pool called demand which is launching kind of in beta right now which

698
00:58:53,335 --> 00:59:01,755
does allow transaction selection and then so these early shoots of small pools enabling this

699
00:59:01,755 --> 00:59:06,055
has created a little bit of noise within the mining community.

700
00:59:06,275 --> 00:59:09,916
And I like to pretend that I also had a part in that

701
00:59:09,916 --> 00:59:13,175
with my main stage talk you talked about in Nashville last year,

702
00:59:13,275 --> 00:59:15,295
where I really tried to hammer this issue home,

703
00:59:15,335 --> 00:59:16,595
as well as some podcasts, you know,

704
00:59:16,595 --> 00:59:18,775
trying to really talk to miners and say,

705
00:59:18,896 --> 00:59:21,055
this is a major issue, you need to fix this.

706
00:59:22,735 --> 00:59:25,016
And so there's Stratton V2,

707
00:59:25,155 --> 00:59:27,295
the software is finally becoming ready.

708
00:59:27,575 --> 00:59:29,476
And I know they're talking to a number of pools

709
00:59:29,476 --> 00:59:31,856
who are hearing from some of their miners that they want this.

710
00:59:31,996 --> 00:59:34,476
And so hopefully that starts to become an option

711
00:59:34,476 --> 00:59:35,615
at some of the larger pools

712
00:59:35,615 --> 00:59:36,936
and some of the moderate-sized pools

713
00:59:36,936 --> 00:59:38,655
over the next number of months.

714
00:59:39,856 --> 00:59:43,695
And then almost entirely flew under the radar,

715
00:59:44,335 --> 00:59:48,755
Bitmain announced in Vegas at a site event

716
00:59:48,755 --> 01:00:02,203
that they were going to start enabling their miners to select the transactions in their block Totally under the radar somehow didn get picked up by almost any media in Bitcoin or podcasts or whatever I haven seen people talking about it

717
01:00:02,263 --> 01:00:07,723
but that is possibly the biggest announcement that was made in Vegas by an order of magnitude.

718
01:00:08,383 --> 01:00:14,883
That's huge for Bitcoin. It's Bitmain. We don't know what protocol they're using. They haven't

719
01:00:14,883 --> 01:00:20,983
said anything. They haven't provided any details. Who knows? Maybe it's something they will launch

720
01:00:20,983 --> 01:00:26,443
in five years maybe it's already running we don't have any idea what's going on but they said the

721
01:00:26,443 --> 01:00:30,903
fact that they even committed and said look we think this is important enough that we want to do

722
01:00:30,903 --> 01:00:40,983
this is huge i did not hear about that clearly i was uh like too too busy uh it was that it was at

723
01:00:40,983 --> 01:00:48,563
some side event that like i saw one tweet about it and that was it wow well i mean that's like if

724
01:00:48,563 --> 01:00:51,303
If they follow through with that, that's pretty massive, though.

725
01:00:51,403 --> 01:00:52,343
Absolutely massive.

726
01:00:52,463 --> 01:00:52,603
Yeah.

727
01:00:52,663 --> 01:00:58,083
I mean, it would take the largest Bitcoin pool by far and totally decentralize it.

728
01:00:58,083 --> 01:01:02,003
Now, of course, their miners have to switch their software stack and they have to start using it.

729
01:01:02,603 --> 01:01:05,403
But it makes that an option.

730
01:01:05,503 --> 01:01:07,623
It makes it possible to totally decentralize.

731
01:01:07,863 --> 01:01:08,283
OK.

732
01:01:08,943 --> 01:01:12,843
90 percent decentralize one of the largest pools in Bitcoin or the largest pool in Bitcoin.

733
01:01:13,263 --> 01:01:13,923
That's huge.

734
01:01:13,923 --> 01:01:24,103
Do you think they're coming at that from an altruistic perspective of we want Bitcoin or we want what's best for Bitcoin?

735
01:01:24,523 --> 01:01:27,003
Is there another potential ulterior motive?

736
01:01:27,203 --> 01:01:39,483
I mean, or is it just that, hey, look, if Bitcoin pools are too centralized and you don't have this optionality here, well, ultimately, that's not good for Bitcoin, which is not good for our bottom line down the road.

737
01:01:39,623 --> 01:01:42,463
So, hey, like, you know, the game theory of Bitcoin just works out that way.

738
01:01:42,463 --> 01:01:44,343
Yeah, I mean, I don't know.

739
01:01:45,003 --> 01:01:46,343
I'm asking you to speculate here.

740
01:01:46,543 --> 01:01:56,583
So, you know, obviously Bitmain has a long history of making decisions that look to be very bad for Bitcoin, but good for Bitmain's bottom line.

741
01:01:58,283 --> 01:02:06,483
So I'm not going to give them undue credit for suddenly having had a change of heart and just wanting to do what's best for Bitcoin.

742
01:02:06,483 --> 01:02:15,523
uh i think there is now at least some non-zero demand from miners to enable this um they might

743
01:02:15,523 --> 01:02:22,563
be feeling a little bit of heat from the competition of ocean again ocean is almost no hash rate so i

744
01:02:22,563 --> 01:02:28,663
don't know how much they care um but you know maybe they have some miners saying like hey look

745
01:02:28,663 --> 01:02:34,703
here's this feature i care about this i want to use it why are you not uh offering this service

746
01:02:34,703 --> 01:02:40,363
um i could also take credit and say like well look i got up on the main stage in nashville last year

747
01:02:40,363 --> 01:02:47,823
and and put up a multi-headed monster and pointed to it and said this is bitmain and they're the evil

748
01:02:47,823 --> 01:02:53,003
monster pulling the strings and maybe they said oh this is bad for a business if if everyone thinks

749
01:02:53,003 --> 01:02:56,703
we're the evil flying spaghetti monster or whatever or i guess the flying spaghetti monster

750
01:02:56,703 --> 01:03:02,483
is good i don't know whatever um so you know i'm gonna take credit for it i don't know

751
01:03:02,483 --> 01:03:08,163
but it totally was my all my doing um but yeah we'll we'll see what happens we'll see whether

752
01:03:08,163 --> 01:03:12,363
their miners adopt it we'll see whether they ship it whether they ship stratum b2 or some

753
01:03:12,363 --> 01:03:20,683
proprietary protocol who knows but yeah i mean potentially huge it's that's massive and and

754
01:03:20,683 --> 01:03:25,443
can you if you don't mind just for folks that may be hearing this and say like well okay what's the

755
01:03:25,443 --> 01:03:31,063
big deal anyway why does it matter that miners can can choose what transactions go in the block

756
01:03:31,063 --> 01:03:32,963
Like why can't the pool just do it?

757
01:03:32,963 --> 01:03:36,603
What is the actual reason why that makes a difference?

758
01:03:37,563 --> 01:03:41,523
Yeah, so I think we were talking about this censorship resistance property.

759
01:03:42,483 --> 01:03:58,443
The way Bitcoin intends to get or intended to always get censorship resistance, intended to always have this property that you don't have to trust anyone else in order to be able to transact your Bitcoin, was that cash rate and mining was supposed to be decentralized.

760
01:03:58,443 --> 01:04:07,203
It was supposed to be that there are a lot of miners all around the world, and anytime you want to get your transaction included, you just have to find one that wants to mine your transaction.

761
01:04:07,343 --> 01:04:18,443
Hopefully many do, but you really just have to find one with enough hash rate to regularly mine blocks, and that there are enough miners who have enough hash rate to regularly mine blocks.

762
01:04:18,443 --> 01:04:31,503
That is not hard. That is not the case when the miners, the things who have to pick the transactions that go on the block, who you would have to go to to get your transaction mined are the pools, not the miners.

763
01:04:32,443 --> 01:04:39,183
Mining, ASIC ownership, these farms filled with ASICs are actually fairly decentralized.

764
01:04:39,563 --> 01:04:45,443
There are a lot of them owned by a lot of different countries, companies in a lot of different countries around the world.

765
01:04:45,443 --> 01:04:52,863
you know for in for many practical purposes mining is actually decentralized a lot of people

766
01:04:52,863 --> 01:04:58,003
maybe don't recognize this or think that well there's these four big public companies in the

767
01:04:58,003 --> 01:05:02,983
u.s well if you add up all the big public companies public miners in the u.s they don't

768
01:05:02,983 --> 01:05:08,343
actually have that much hash rate as a percentage of total hash rate uh around the world there's you

769
01:05:08,343 --> 01:05:12,303
know there's a lot in russia and kazakhstan and china and like it's it's in it's all over the

770
01:05:12,303 --> 01:05:20,603
place, right? That's really good. It's really great for Bitcoin. But the thing that needs to

771
01:05:20,603 --> 01:05:24,463
be decentralized is this transaction selection is the like, who do you have to go to to get your

772
01:05:24,463 --> 01:05:29,103
transaction mind? And today, those are pools and pools are super centralized. So we want to take

773
01:05:29,103 --> 01:05:35,303
that, that power and give it to the decentralized group of people rather than having it be in the

774
01:05:35,303 --> 01:05:39,423
centralized group where there's only three or four actual companies who are materially competitive.

775
01:05:39,423 --> 01:05:49,343
you are totally muted right now and you're going to get so much shit for this later

776
01:05:49,343 --> 01:05:55,983
this is so embarrassing oh my gosh uh what i was going to say is it's uh it is great honestly to

777
01:05:55,983 --> 01:06:02,103
see whatever bitmain's actual motivation behind it it's incredible to see them make that move

778
01:06:02,103 --> 01:06:10,223
like because again that's a it's a huge huge deal um which is just kind of wild that this wasn't

779
01:06:10,223 --> 01:06:15,403
wasn't covered more i blame fellow podcast podcast bros like myself we need to do better

780
01:06:15,403 --> 01:06:21,623
i think it was i think they like announced it thursday afternoon on the last day of the

781
01:06:21,623 --> 01:06:26,343
conference when everyone was worn out and like i'm just gonna go watch ross's speech and then

782
01:06:26,343 --> 01:06:31,543
i'm gonna go home and sleep off the hangover like they announced it the worst possible time

783
01:06:31,543 --> 01:06:38,923
at a side event not even the main event and yeah it was like the worst announcement possible but

784
01:06:38,923 --> 01:06:47,563
also one of the biggest that's that is that is wild um so on this is a slightly different note

785
01:06:47,563 --> 01:06:53,463
but i'm curious where you stand on just like the the ossification side of things because i think

786
01:06:53,463 --> 01:06:58,063
this is something that gets like the word ossification gets thrown around a lot um as

787
01:06:58,063 --> 01:07:02,523
though it's like this decision that is made versus something that's just like this natural

788
01:07:02,523 --> 01:07:08,163
progression that happens. And I'm curious where you think we are at in this progression. Maybe

789
01:07:08,163 --> 01:07:12,483
you disagree that this is like a natural progression, but like, where do you think we

790
01:07:12,483 --> 01:07:16,083
were at in this? A lot of people have made the points like, well, Bitcoin's basically,

791
01:07:16,263 --> 01:07:20,903
you know, already effectively ossified. Like you don't get a choice and it just,

792
01:07:20,983 --> 01:07:25,763
it just happens. And maybe it already kind of happened. Where do you sit on this? Where do you

793
01:07:25,763 --> 01:07:32,203
think we're at in that uh is bitcoin still going to change in a material way does bitcoin still

794
01:07:32,203 --> 01:07:39,323
need to change in a material way yeah yeah i mean i do think there is definitely an element of as

795
01:07:39,323 --> 01:07:46,123
bitcoin grows uh it will continue to it'll be harder to change changes will be less frequent

796
01:07:46,123 --> 01:07:52,483
types of changes will be less major i think that's the case um i don't think we're there

797
01:07:52,483 --> 01:07:59,663
yet uh you know bitcoin development is still very small there's still a small group of people who

798
01:07:59,663 --> 01:08:05,443
who work on bitcoin full-time and contribute materially to bitcoin development it's an ever

799
01:08:05,443 --> 01:08:13,723
growing group of people but it's still fairly small um and i think that the community of people

800
01:08:13,723 --> 01:08:19,103
who pay a lot of attention to bitcoin who really know a lot about bitcoin who are deeply

801
01:08:19,103 --> 01:08:26,323
interested in everything that's happening in Bitcoin, who are going to pay attention to the

802
01:08:26,323 --> 01:08:30,103
next software can share an opinion and not just say like, ah, the developers figure it out.

803
01:08:30,743 --> 01:08:35,943
It's still a small group of people. It feels like a lot of people because there's a lot of people

804
01:08:35,943 --> 01:08:41,843
screaming on social media and they're very loud on social media, but it's still not a big group

805
01:08:41,843 --> 01:08:48,743
of people. And so I don't think we're very far down the ossified direction. I know there's a lot

806
01:08:48,743 --> 01:08:55,643
of people who think we are a ways down that direction because it feels to them like, well,

807
01:08:55,683 --> 01:09:02,303
there's no changes happening in Bitcoin and the changes that are getting proposed aren't getting

808
01:09:02,303 --> 01:09:09,163
adopted and yada yada. I think that's just a consequence of developers being busy with other

809
01:09:09,163 --> 01:09:12,823
stuff. I talked about Mempool and these big changes happening in Bitcoin Core. It's like,

810
01:09:12,823 --> 01:09:19,283
okay well developers are busy with lots of other things going on and in part as a consequence

811
01:09:19,283 --> 01:09:24,783
they're not working on a lot of soft works they're they're kind of look at various soft

812
01:09:24,783 --> 01:09:29,743
works proposals and like yeah okay that that might move the needle on some stuff but not

813
01:09:29,743 --> 01:09:33,943
a huge deal it's not like fundamentally re-architecting bitcoin or fundamentally

814
01:09:33,943 --> 01:09:41,823
enabling new things as much as some proponents claim they're generally not um and so people are

815
01:09:41,823 --> 01:09:48,583
like, oh, OK, we'll get to that. And so I think it's easy to read too much into the fact that

816
01:09:48,583 --> 01:09:53,323
there aren't many changes, haven't been many changes to Bitcoin lately. And I don't think

817
01:09:53,323 --> 01:09:58,083
people should read that much into that. I think, you know, we'll we'll see what happens. But I don't

818
01:09:58,083 --> 01:10:03,903
think we need to read too much into that. And yeah, I mean, I think we'll get to a

819
01:10:03,903 --> 01:10:08,783
ossification point. I hope we're not there yet. I don't think we're even really all that close to

820
01:10:08,783 --> 01:10:18,323
there yet um but yeah do you in terms of like how you view bitcoin development more broadly

821
01:10:18,323 --> 01:10:24,663
as it encompasses layer two three whatever development is it what's your view on that

822
01:10:24,663 --> 01:10:30,163
in terms of where kind of like where does the quote uh to use a just buzzword innovation

823
01:10:30,163 --> 01:10:36,123
happen in terms of the user experience like it would seem that that happens on these you know

824
01:10:36,123 --> 01:10:40,203
on the layer twos, on the lightnings, or going whatever layer you think this is,

825
01:10:40,263 --> 01:10:41,643
like on the e-cash side of things.

826
01:10:41,643 --> 01:10:44,363
Is that where you think a lot of this stuff happens?

827
01:10:44,603 --> 01:10:49,103
And maybe that's why there's not so much of an urgency

828
01:10:49,103 --> 01:10:52,583
behind a lot of these current proposed changes to base layer?

829
01:10:53,103 --> 01:10:53,743
Yeah, in part.

830
01:10:54,223 --> 01:10:58,883
Certainly the various layer twos, layer two and a halves,

831
01:10:59,743 --> 01:11:03,023
custodial with more privacy, whatever you want to call these various systems,

832
01:11:03,523 --> 01:11:04,443
move a lot faster.

833
01:11:04,863 --> 01:11:05,603
They can.

834
01:11:05,603 --> 01:11:26,503
There's no, they don't have a whole group of different people who have different stakeholders who all have to agree to any change. And so they move a lot faster. They still move slower than we'd like. Lightning still is taking a long time to get to a point where we're happy with it. But they move fast. And so that is a lot of the focus.

835
01:11:26,503 --> 01:11:28,983
And that's also a lot of the focus of user experience in Bitcoin.

836
01:11:29,163 --> 01:11:37,283
You know, where is the wallet of the future in six months, eight months, 18 months?

837
01:11:37,743 --> 01:11:39,443
What kind of wallet are people going to be building?

838
01:11:39,663 --> 01:11:40,923
Well, it's not an on-chain wallet.

839
01:11:41,263 --> 01:11:46,803
No one's sitting down and saying, I'm going to build a new on-chain Bitcoin wallet for people to use on their phones.

840
01:11:47,883 --> 01:11:52,503
Okay, maybe some people have some high security, whatever, but that's not what's happening.

841
01:11:52,623 --> 01:11:55,043
And so the focus is really on these second-layer systems.

842
01:11:55,043 --> 01:12:08,623
And I think you're right that the – but I think at the same time, that's not to discount how much work has to happen in Bitcoin Core on the on-chain side of things to enable those.

843
01:12:09,503 --> 01:12:19,083
There's a lot of people who would argue that we need various changes, software consensus changes to Bitcoin to enable some of these L2s.

844
01:12:19,083 --> 01:12:33,643
I don't think that's necessarily true, but we have needed, for example, mempool policy changes like big overhauls to the mempool and Bitcoin core in order to enable Lightning to have a better security model and in order to enable Lightning to have a better usability story.

845
01:12:34,463 --> 01:12:38,343
Those changes also help ARK and other L2s too.

846
01:12:39,023 --> 01:12:42,683
So that's where a lot of the work in Bitcoin core has been focused.

847
01:12:42,683 --> 01:12:57,603
On the software side, there are various proposals that would improve some L2s. I think the improvements to Lightning are moderate, but the improvements to other L2s like Arc are maybe more substantial.

848
01:12:57,603 --> 01:13:06,363
there's still usability user experience questions around arc um but uh the wit but most importantly

849
01:13:06,363 --> 01:13:11,203
people are deploying them now without any software changes people can actually sit down and build

850
01:13:11,203 --> 01:13:17,743
these things and this gives you a much better story for okay as bitcoin core finishes up some

851
01:13:17,743 --> 01:13:23,923
of its fairly large overhauls to the mempool people are deploying these l2s lightning gets good

852
01:13:23,923 --> 01:13:32,563
Arc starts getting deployed, Spark and whatever else gets deployed, and people start using these things, roll-ups, importantly, start getting deployed.

853
01:13:33,063 --> 01:13:37,763
Then we can see, okay, well, how are these technologies being used?

854
01:13:38,363 --> 01:13:39,963
What does the usability look like?

855
01:13:40,143 --> 01:13:41,483
How are they faring in the market?

856
01:13:41,783 --> 01:13:43,343
Are people interested in using them?

857
01:13:43,463 --> 01:13:44,883
Are they really providing value?

858
01:13:44,883 --> 01:13:57,723
And then we can sit down and say, OK, here, you know, I think this specific technology would be 10x better if only we had this software.

859
01:13:58,183 --> 01:14:04,123
And it's just not providing the value that it would to the ecosystem if we because we don't have that.

860
01:14:04,363 --> 01:14:09,063
But we only really learn that as we start to deploy things, as we start to actually build things.

861
01:14:09,483 --> 01:14:12,703
And so I think we'll we'll get back to the software game.

862
01:14:12,703 --> 01:14:17,983
we'll get back to it, but we'll come into it with a lot more information than we have now.

863
01:14:17,983 --> 01:14:23,323
And with a lot, ton, ton, ton more information than we had even two years ago, where a lot of

864
01:14:23,323 --> 01:14:30,823
these ideas like Spark, like BitVM didn't exist. So we were kind of flying blind with like, well,

865
01:14:30,823 --> 01:14:34,123
we should do this soft fork to get this set of features. Like, okay, well, we don't know how to

866
01:14:34,123 --> 01:14:38,903
use that. Now we have ideas for how to use it. Now we can sit down and say, okay, how do we

867
01:14:38,903 --> 01:14:43,363
actually want it to look because we have ideas for how to use it and we have these systems that

868
01:14:43,363 --> 01:14:48,163
people are actually even building and we're going to see how they're going to work more like

869
01:14:48,163 --> 01:14:53,363
practical uh versus just purely theoretical and saying hey this sounds nice like which is

870
01:14:53,363 --> 01:14:57,483
ultimately you're going to get more buy-in from people if that's the case as well like if you're

871
01:14:57,483 --> 01:15:01,563
just throwing out theoretical ideas like nobody wants to hear about your theoretical idea that

872
01:15:01,563 --> 01:15:05,443
sounds cool like but if you have something in practice that's a different story and i think

873
01:15:05,443 --> 01:15:10,403
that was a huge reason why things haven't happened is they just didn't degenerate excitement because

874
01:15:10,403 --> 01:15:18,003
they were theoretical and even even the the practical ideas that people proposed were like

875
01:15:18,003 --> 01:15:24,083
still too theoretical um and now there's like there's real practical stuff it's like okay i

876
01:15:24,083 --> 01:15:30,083
can see this i can see how people are building it i can see why people are building it we can see how

877
01:15:30,083 --> 01:15:36,723
people use it and now it's like okay well now we really should do this or that and we should tweak

878
01:15:36,723 --> 01:15:43,083
it slightly because it would help this a little more and whatever i'm gonna be conscious of your

879
01:15:43,083 --> 01:15:48,863
of your time here matt and i want to give another uh shout out to people to go to save our wallets

880
01:15:48,863 --> 01:15:54,703
dot org i'm gonna uh do it myself i i need i was gonna try and get the the call made before uh we

881
01:15:54,703 --> 01:16:00,903
hopped on here, but I did not yet. But you have my word that I will make my voice heard to my

882
01:16:00,903 --> 01:16:05,783
elected representatives. And I would encourage people to do this because it's genuinely such a,

883
01:16:05,843 --> 01:16:10,843
like, it'll take five minutes of your day. And if you can't spend five minutes to, you know,

884
01:16:11,003 --> 01:16:14,523
to do a little something for Bitcoin, well, like, I don't know what to tell you. Like,

885
01:16:14,523 --> 01:16:17,063
go use the dollar. I mean, you just listen to an hour and a half podcast.

886
01:16:17,423 --> 01:16:20,823
Exactly. You can pick up the phone for five minutes. You clearly have the time.

887
01:16:20,823 --> 01:16:25,763
Exactly. That's, that's the best, that's the best argument. If you're listening to 40 hours

888
01:16:25,763 --> 01:16:30,983
of podcasts per week, you can take five minutes and go, uh, and go call your elected official.

889
01:16:31,163 --> 01:16:35,783
And I think this is important too, because people, I think sometimes want to like reject the political

890
01:16:35,783 --> 01:16:39,123
establishment entirely and say, well, we just don't even need to pay attention to them. We

891
01:16:39,123 --> 01:16:43,703
don't need to do it. And that's fine. You can feel that way, but the, you know, it's like,

892
01:16:43,703 --> 01:16:48,443
you may not care about politics, but politics cares about you. And these lawmakers are going

893
01:16:48,443 --> 01:16:54,443
to make laws that you do not like and do not benefit you and do not make you more free because

894
01:16:54,443 --> 01:17:00,143
they're laws if you don't stand up and say something. So in this case, where it's a nice,

895
01:17:00,383 --> 01:17:05,423
simple bill that just allows developers to actually develop without the fear of incarceration,

896
01:17:06,283 --> 01:17:09,503
I think that's something that everyone should be able to get behind. So thank you. Anything else

897
01:17:09,503 --> 01:17:15,203
you want to anywhere else you want to send people besides saveourwallets.org? No, that's the big one.

898
01:17:15,203 --> 01:17:16,443
Yeah, saveourwallets.org.

899
01:17:16,583 --> 01:17:17,403
You can type your zip code.

900
01:17:17,583 --> 01:17:18,823
You can put in your email.

901
01:17:19,483 --> 01:17:21,223
You're just giving me your email.

902
01:17:21,663 --> 01:17:22,763
We might send you an email.

903
01:17:22,883 --> 01:17:23,903
We might not send you an email.

904
01:17:24,043 --> 01:17:26,163
In fact, if nothing interesting happens, we won't send you an email.

905
01:17:26,523 --> 01:17:27,703
We're not going to use it to spam you.

906
01:17:27,763 --> 01:17:28,683
It's just going in database.

907
01:17:28,943 --> 01:17:30,643
Maybe we'll share it with MailChimp or something.

908
01:17:31,483 --> 01:17:31,643
Yeah.

909
01:17:32,003 --> 01:17:34,403
But hopefully they don't get hacked again.

910
01:17:34,663 --> 01:17:34,963
Hopefully.

911
01:17:36,263 --> 01:17:38,203
But just type in your zip code.

912
01:17:38,303 --> 01:17:39,283
We proxy it for you.

913
01:17:39,343 --> 01:17:40,263
We don't log anything.

914
01:17:40,983 --> 01:17:42,623
It's all anonymized.

915
01:17:42,683 --> 01:17:43,243
You're fine.

916
01:17:43,243 --> 01:17:44,283
Just call your reps.

917
01:17:45,203 --> 01:17:49,823
Save our wallets.org. It's not complicated. Spend five minutes. Help Bitcoin.

918
01:17:51,283 --> 01:17:57,723
It's a it's a great pitch. And also the website's very nice. It was designed by the Bitcoin design community. Yeah.

919
01:17:58,183 --> 01:18:04,603
Yeah. Yeah. There's a there's a whole community of people whose job is now to just make Bitcoin look better.

920
01:18:04,603 --> 01:18:08,463
They're awesome. One of the people in that community stood up.

921
01:18:08,603 --> 01:18:13,163
I said, like, hey, I think we need to promote this BRCA bill a little better.

922
01:18:13,163 --> 01:18:16,543
and one of them raised their hand and said like,

923
01:18:16,603 --> 01:18:18,483
yeah, I can do that.

924
01:18:18,583 --> 01:18:20,143
And so they sat down, designed it.

925
01:18:20,263 --> 01:18:22,503
They had an LLM actually turn it into real code.

926
01:18:23,123 --> 01:18:24,663
It's great what these things can do.

927
01:18:24,783 --> 01:18:27,003
And yeah, now we have a website.

928
01:18:28,243 --> 01:18:29,023
I love it.

929
01:18:29,263 --> 01:18:31,643
Just designing it and then vibe coding it into existence.

930
01:18:31,903 --> 01:18:32,763
It's a beautiful thing.

931
01:18:33,003 --> 01:18:34,663
Well, Matt, thank you so much.

932
01:18:34,743 --> 01:18:35,543
Appreciate your time.

933
01:18:35,643 --> 01:18:36,723
Thanks for all the work that you do.

934
01:18:36,923 --> 01:18:39,883
And looking forward to another banger of a presentation

935
01:18:39,883 --> 01:18:41,263
from you at some point.

936
01:18:41,263 --> 01:18:45,223
I'll link a couple of these old ones so people can check them out because they are quite good.

937
01:18:46,203 --> 01:18:46,723
Thanks.

938
01:19:11,263 --> 01:19:14,564
and this podcast at primal.net slash titcoin.

939
01:19:15,003 --> 01:19:18,423
On X, YouTube, and Rumble, just search at Walker America

940
01:19:18,423 --> 01:19:23,283
and find this podcast on X and Instagram at titcoinpodcast.

941
01:19:23,423 --> 01:19:25,963
Head to the show notes to grab sponsor links,

942
01:19:25,963 --> 01:19:28,923
head to substack.com slash at Walker America

943
01:19:28,923 --> 01:19:30,783
to get episodes emailed to you

944
01:19:30,783 --> 01:19:34,583
and head to bitcoinpodcast.net for everything else.

945
01:19:35,123 --> 01:19:38,683
Bitcoin is scarce, but podcasts are abundant.

946
01:19:38,683 --> 01:19:44,023
So thank you for spending your scarce time listening to The Bitcoin Podcast.

947
01:19:44,923 --> 01:19:47,343
Until next time, stay free.