Hello, everybody. My name is Daniel Prince, and I'm the host of the Once Bitten podcast.
This is a podcast focused on Bitcoin. It's my mission to interview as many people as I can
around the different aspects of Bitcoin and help people understand exactly what Bitcoin
could mean for them and for their families and for their future. I hope you enjoy the show.
thank you so much for listening. Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of the Once Bitten
podcast. I hope everybody has enjoyed a good break. At time of recording this one is going out,
excuse me, at time of editing this one's going out 28th of December so we are post the Christmas
day and boxing day and pre-New Year's Day. I hope everybody's having a great time getting to spend
lots of time with friends and family if you are the lonely bitcoiner in your family and amongst
your friends group you only have yourself to blame at this point i'm sorry if that sounds harsh but
club orange has been around for years now it used to be called orange pill app it's now called club
orange you can join that app today just by clicking the link in the show notes and be connected to
almost 20,000 other Bitcoiners around the world and some of whom are going to be very close to
where you are. I can almost guarantee that. I won't guarantee that with certainty. But you might
find someone anywhere between a 10-minute drive or an hour's drive away from you that you can start
connecting with as you move into the new year. Stop being the lonely Bitcoiner. Club Arrange
fixes this get over become a member come find us all on there today's show is with jesse schrader
from ambos he's here to tell us why the lightning network is not dead and never will be and what's
coming for the future of ambos so look forward to this one guys because this is going to be a very
interesting topic as we move into 2026 and bitcoin becoming a medium of exchange rather than just the
you'll never have to sell your bitcoin dudes just borrow your uh send your bitcoin to us
you can borrow fiat from god knows where else and we will give you that fiat and then you've
got to pay interest on that fiat but you don't have to sell your bitcoin that's all nonsense
bitcoin needs to become a medium exchange if we are going to escape that system that we are
we keep constantly validating it with all of this kind of fiatting around on it so bitcoin
medium exchange this is going to be the btc prague ethos next year as well so if you want to
get to btc prague that's going to be in june the code bitten is still running it's going to be
running again you can use that code to get a 10 discount start planning your events for next year
if you've never been to a bitcoin event make it a new year's resolution get to one so meet
bitcoiners club orange get to an event btc prague perfect uh and bitten will get you a uh a discount
and B2C Prague
and there's a referral link
in the show notes
for the Club Orange app.
Stacking your sats
can be easier
if you're across Europe.
Relay,
R-E-L-A-I
dot C-H
forward slash Bitten.
You can download
that app today
and start stacking
immediately
and be in control
of your Bitcoin
because it's a self-custodial
Bitcoin wallet
built into the app.
So get over to Relay.
If you've never heard
of Relay before,
just go back
two or three episodes
I had Julian Linegar on.
He's the CEO and co-founder of Relay.
And we go through the whole process of them getting their current Mica license, M-I-C-A license in Europe.
But taking self-custody is very important.
I hope everybody got themselves a bit box hardware wallet for Christmas.
If not, again, New Year's resolution.
3rd of Jan is Proof of Keys Day.
Proof of Keys Day means 3rd of January every year.
those people that still have not taken self-custody and still have some Bitcoin on an exchange
somewhere remove all their Bitcoin from the exchange. It is kind of a group effort to stress
test the exchanges out there to make sure that they are keeping full reserves of the Bitcoin.
But you should be in control of your Bitcoin, not them. And that's what bitbox.swiss forward slash
bittern can do for you because that is a hardware wallet. They've been around for a long time now.
They've got the Bitbox O2 or the Bitbox Nova that are purely Bitcoin only.
And they've got the great Beanie.
Thank you very much, guys.
I opened that on Christmas morning.
I have an open source everything Beanie.
And that is thank you very much again from the Bitbox team.
Paywithflash.com is the place for you to go now and set up your dashboard, get your account up and running so you can start invoicing and receiving Bitcoin for your goods and services.
very easy to use very simple paywithflash.com get over there that is being built by bitcoiners
for bitcoiners so you can start accepting goods and services for your bitcoin like i said 2026
btc prague they're going to be talking about using bitcoin bitcoin becoming a medium exchange
we've got jesse about to come on and talk about the lightning network the lightning network is
the best place to start using Bitcoin as a medium exchange. PayWithFlash.com is already set up for
you to use Bitcoin as a medium exchange. So get ready for it. This is going to be one of the
narratives going into next year. I'm up for it. I'm really looking forward to it. I hope you have
a great end to the year and enjoy this one with Jesse. All right, Jesse, good to have you back on
the show how you doing doing great uh it's a pleasure to be back right so uh i can't remember
what lauren would have asked you last time do you i don't you know i i wish i did well she's not
around unfortunately but one of her favorite questions would have when i when i tell her
you know what the people do in the space and who are coming on she would have said uh what is the
lightning network yeah uh you want me to answer that right now as if you were talking to a 14 year
old lauren let's do it uh the lightning network is a way to move bitcoin faster cheaper in in a way
that actually can serve a whole bunch of the future needs um including ai or micro payments
basically anything that we want to use money for today can essentially be accommodated now because
we have the capacity to do so now now the money that we have grown to to love has is now has the
ability to to serve the full needs of the entire you know global business and economy
excellently put uh and and the reason i would have wanted her to lead off of that question is
because we are still so early and we've got new people joining us every day and we're in that
kind of period of the cycle where you're starting to get the tweets oh excuse me you're starting to
get the texts from your friends i literally just got a text from my landlord's son who's in his
40s asking me whether I can help him navigate the waters of crypto so it's it we're there right
and if we start sharing podcasts uh around and uh the podcasts you know I would be guilty of this
you know I'm five almost six years into hosting a podcast and I just assume the people that are
listening have been listening for a while and they understand all this stuff and we've really
got to kind of pare it back and keep it as simple you know keep it simple stupid right kiss uh so
that's a that's a great way to uh to lead off and i don't want people thinking i made the mistake in
the early early days of of lightning thinking oh this is just another shit coin right i i thought
it was another ico uh because it hadn't been explained um or i hadn't found the right podcast
And I think, I can't remember, maybe, oh, it's escaping me now, who I think I landed on Andreas.
And Andreas, using analogies to describe it, back in, when was the paper released?
17?
18?
Yeah, the actual paper came out in 2015.
Wow.
And then it actually, you know, went live in 2018.
Right.
And then I was joining the Lightning Network, I think by the end of 2018, and then really
diving in because of some of the things that Andreas Sanzanopoulos had said, and because
I had a horrible experience actually making a Bitcoin payment and it taking too long and
being too expensive.
Do you remember what he was saying?
What analogies he was using back then, 2018?
And do you remember what pod it was on?
Or was it an article?
Oh, man.
But, you know, like my kind of orange build was actually listening to Andreas Antonopoulos and listening to the Internet of Money audiobook and waking up and just couldn't think about anything else.
Like, oh, my God, this is amazing.
This has changed the world.
But, you know, I was also like a Patreon subscriber.
So I was listening to his like kind of webinars to have like the Q&A.
But, I mean, the guy, he is incredible.
Andreas Antonopoulos can come up with analogies that just really help solidify understanding.
I still use some of the things that he said, but I can't remember a particular one.
I remember a particular one.
It must have been a little bit later than that, 2019, maybe.
It was on Peter's show when he was still hosting What Bitcoin Did.
And with another guy, and I can't, the guy's name is escaping me right now.
And they went through it like really really basic but the guy got long blonde hair guy and they wrote a book about it um i sure they wrote a book together but uh yeah andreas like
those but i remember the internet of money book just ripping through that and then going on to
find all of the links to watch the actual talks and then read the the that talk again uh in in the
book and yeah he made um yeah hats off andreas i know he listens to the show so you know it's uh
i'm kidding fans yeah i'm sure andreas has better things to do than tune into one's bits and uh two
or three times a week but um so it ah what was it what were you doing then before before you fell
down this rabbit hole?
You know, I was working for the government.
You know, I think, let's see, I had worked in legal services.
Is that what you're saying?
I mean, is this the big group?
No, I was actually working in transportation.
Right.
So I had a job that was gathering road surface data by driving every single state road in
Oregon.
You know, there's basically one or two people that does this in every single state in the
us and they just kind of report on the conditions of the roads um and wait wait wait that's as
technical as it gets like just get in the car and drive the roads count the potholes or like
what were you doing what were the metrics uh yeah i mean if you really want to get into it um so
one was roughness of the road and so i was driving a special truck with five lasers on it and it was
sample 10,000 samples a second and measured kind of distance, you know, did the pavement
deviate a lot?
You know, was it rough?
Which is actually a lagging indicator of a road failing.
And additionally, I was measuring rut depth.
So basically, you know, as these heavy trucks drive along the road or people use studded
tires. Is it digging away at the pavement or is it pushing the pavement away from the actual wheel
paths? But overall, you don't want ruts. So we're measuring rut depth as you drive at highway speeds
is really quite cool. And then we also measured friction so that what you can kind of use a
standard test tire, spray water on it and measure like in a wet condition, how, you know, how
effectively could you stop on this pavement? And it actually like revealed some like interesting
spots to be like, wow, that's really low friction. But, you know, I'm just I'm just driving around
every single state road, listening to podcasts or anything that I could find that's interesting,
because it's a perpetual road trip. And, you know, with another person to discuss things with,
it was a blast as far as like a job to have like early on in your like engineering career
but but that's kind of like how I kind of stumbled onto some of these some of these concepts and it
resonated you know with some of the other things that I had encountered before so you must have
had some great conversations with libertarians would you were you the guy that would say
who would build the roads you know at that point i was the liberal guy you know i came to i came to
bitcoin as like a progressive like i was the bernie guy they were all warning each other like
the guy is a liberal you know um and it was kind of funny uh because you know i was like pro-government
at that point. And everybody else was like, kind of more much more libertarian oriented.
And it was funny, my politics have completely changed, you know, after after Bitcoin,
realizing the debt situation that we're in. Yeah, complete 180.
And when you look at like that, so sorry, just to just to geek out a little bit on on the roads,
you said it was a lag one of those was a lagging indicator so what would be a leading indicator of
road decay um there might be some other ones so maybe like cracking on the surface um or there's
some things that you could spot uh but yeah it's it's a little little tricky um but one thing that
learned from that experience is that if you're just patching potholes you like that is a lagging
indicator as well you cannot fix a road simply by patching potholes and sometimes it's more
strategic to actually let a road completely fail and not do repairs on it and instead focus on the
things that are working well and keep those in good condition because you're going to eventually
have to do a full depth. We just lost your audio. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. You're back again.
You got to do a full depth. Yeah. On, on some of these roads that have failed, you have to do a
full depth reconstruction, which is disruptive and expensive, but, but basically I think a lot
of people have an idea of how to fix the roads. But you want to be strategic because you only have
so much money. How do you make it go as far as possible? And that was like, that was the allocation
problem that I was kind of presented with. Because once I take that data back to the office,
then it's a discussion about how do we make this go as far as possible? How do we allocate this
budget and preserve an important transportation network. And from that experience, now I'm looking
at how do I maintain a financial transportation network, which is the Lightning Network.
And both critical infrastructure, right? So it's interesting that the analogy there is so perfect.
And what would you say about potholes as well for us British listeners? I mean, I don't know
the state of your roads in the US, but my goodness,
like what is going on here is crazy.
And granted, where we live, we're quite rural.
So the roads aren't going to be top of, you know,
people's to-do list at Central Planning Headquarters.
But you can see it's such a game of whack-a-mole.
it's it's actually kind of intellectually
ridiculous that you know these guys they go out in their flatbed trucks
and they're working all hours and they're going out and they're literally just filling the holes
full of this kind of tarmac-y tar-y stuff that's a quick dry thing and but they have to close the
roads to do that so there's always traffic mayhem all around where we're we're living at the moment
and you know sure as shit that they're going to be back to patch those up in nine to 12 months time
and it's almost as if hang on a minute right is this just a ruse now just to keep the money coming
in because they're incentivized when you look at the incentives they're incentivized to use
materials, I'm sure they're government regulated materials that they have to use. But it's in their
interest to have more potholes, not just fix them. So the problem goes away, because then they're
going to run out of work. And for the central planners, the councils, in the case of the United
Kingdom, it's their incentive to spend all their budget every year. Because if they don't, then
the people above them tell them, well, we gave you obviously too much budget, so we'll cut your
budget so we can give that somewhere so it's like this perpetual circle of absolute waste
and misallocation of capital and um upside down incentives which is what fiat and central planning
brings it's insane it kind of tells me that there's a disconnect between like experts in the
field and like the political momentum you know because potholes is a political issue um actual
like transportation engineering is not so much of a political issue. It's basically given a budget,
how do I make it go as far as possible? But if all the political momentum is on, you know,
fixing potholes, you'll never actually solve the root of the issue. I mean, when it comes to
kind of relating to what, you know, we know about is, you know, Bitcoin, it's basically
when inflation happens, well, I think most of the people are upset about grocery prices
and the product, the prices of their food and the prices of housing. But that's not the like,
and then the political momentum is on price controls and rent control. When the actual
problem is completely different than that, it is actually the creation of money, which is not even
factoring into the political discourse at all. We're looking at the effect of some root causes
that have happened far before. Here we are talking about potholes on a Bitcoin podcast. I love it.
The tangents that you get thrown off is brilliant. All right. Okay. So let's come back to
to Amboss. Let's get people up to speed.
You know, what is it that you actually do in the Bitcoin space?
You'll be forever known as the pothole guy now, but I'm sorry.
You're just going to have to wear that one.
Happy to be called whatever But basically what Amboss does is help people coordinate to create a debt free payment system We know that Bitcoin can scale to serve global payments So we have to
think about ways to actually make it possible for everyone to use this phenomenal technology for
money and for settlement. So how do we scale Bitcoin up? Well, we created the Lightning Network
Not we, but really Amboss is using the Lightning Network and helping people coordinate in a decentralized way.
We're basically communicating, hey, there's a market for actually creating infrastructure that can deliver payments like anywhere in the world at very fast speeds without introducing new money.
So no credit is created.
No debt relationships are created.
It's really about just relationships.
Who do you want to connect to?
Where is strategic to allocate your Bitcoin?
And from that, we've released a series of products that help Amboss be a liquidity coordinator for this Lightning Network that requires liquidity because there's no credit and there's no debt.
Right. So let's use an example of how some of the guys that are already using the Lightning network, they've downloaded three or four different Lightning wallets that they might be using, hopefully day to day, but probably not.
We're not quite there yet, but as we move to a medium of exchange, we all will be.
Once they've made that Bitcoin payment, how might they have touched Amboss without even realizing it?
Yeah, so basically, most consumers are going to be using a wallet, and the wallet is running the infrastructure for them.
so they can go to Amboss and look up their wallet
and see all of the connections that it has on the Lightning Network.
You can see the relationships that are created.
So a lot of people use Wallet of Satoshi.
But you can look up the node and see, you know,
the potentially thousands of connections that they actually have.
So every time you issue a payment,
it's going to travel along one of those connections
and reach to different destinations.
And we want to see a really decentralized network. We don't just want everybody using
wallet of Satoshi. Credit to them for making a great product. But we want this thing to be fully
decentralized. And so it means not trusting in just one provider because anybody can participate
in this financial network. They can start a node if they're really technical and want to get into
this. Or, you know, we built products so that people just need to bring the capital, will run
the operation. And basically, we package that up in a product called Rails, which allows people to
just deploy Bitcoin, Ambus will run the operations, manage the connections,
help set market rates for fees that they can charge. And all in all, really work to return
more capital to those people that are using Rails because they are infrastructure providers
and they should be compensated for that. So you use the term liquidity coordinator. Do you want
to just drill down in case that passed over a few people's heads? Sure. Yeah. So like whenever you
go to swipe your card, basically before you're even granted a card, well, the bank is going to
do an assessment on you. Are you a credit risk to me? I'm going to look at your entire financial
history, every payment that you've made, your credit score, or what have you, before I even
give you a card. And then the card networks are also onboarding merchants. And they're going to
charge these merchants based on what they think the fraud risk is. Because every time you go to
tap, swipe, dip your card, well, there's a credit relationship, there's a loan that is created.
And one, the question is, are you going to be good on that loan?
Are you going to actually pay your credit card bill?
And then are you going to do a chargeback and say, I never paid that?
Or you have some fraud event.
But basically, it's a whole mess of a system that ends up causing more expensive products for consumers.
It causes the cost of goods to increase because the payment processing is expensive.
So we're baking in three, sometimes four percent into every single transaction that we're making, especially for online retailers.
They're going to be paying four percent and they're going to have to increase the prices of whatever good or service they want to sell because of the cost of payment processing.
but here what we're doing with lightning is we're removing all of this this credit and debt from the
system i don't need to know anything about you because what we have is cryptographic proof
but what we have to do in order to set that up is create the infrastructure first
so that means creating a lightning channel and having liquidity so you have the money it's ready
to go. It's already loaded up into this system. And we could fire off this payment from a cannon
and actually make this payment happen. And there's no trust that is needed in the system.
You have final settlement. And really, that's our whole job is get the Bitcoin in the right
places in the network to make this entire system work very, very well.
so there's been a lot of um noise in the bitcoin space certainly over the last two years uh we've
had ordinals we've had inscriptions we've had runes we've had brc20 tokens uh we've now got
the knots versus core debates we've got this new bip on the plate 444 and the community has you
really being divided over a lot of things here.
And early on in this whole thing, back probably 18 months ago now,
there was the whole Layer 2 debacle.
It was like, I know we've had Paper Bitcoin Summer.
I remember Layer 2 Bitcoin Summer, where there was a new Layer 2 solution.
It felt like every other day, maybe it was more weekly back in those days,
but time passes so quickly.
and we were told the narrative you know lightning's never worked bro like you know
these people that were pushing the other layer too it was always yeah lightning never worked
it was never going to scale we need to do this that and the other thing do you remember those
days and some of those actors and and what were you guys thinking you know about all of this because
it was, again, it was just a really divisive time.
I think a lot of the layer twos were very distracting because, you know, when I was
speaking to investors, I was having to explain all of the different things that any of these
guys were pitching.
But it was all pre-product.
They had, you know, no release of this thing.
And I was having to answer questions about, well, you know, what if this thing takes off?
And of course, like payments is a great story.
It's a massive, massive market.
And like, that's what, you know, the layer two is really aimed to solve.
Many of the layer twos that were created or proposed involved creating a new token.
And that's where you have the exact same token incentives of the ICO boom.
And basically, you've got this unregistered securities risk.
I don't want to buy this token because I'm basically buying equity in your startup and it's not properly issued.
Like that's I think that was one of the key issues with all of the layer twos.
But some of them were legit.
I think one thing that we've learned, you know, the critics of Lightning in one respect are right, that it's not really for consumer payments.
It functions much better for businesses that want to do very fast, low cost payments at scale.
But right now where we're at is kind of this, I'm getting flashbacks to the ICO boom because now it's stable coins are being issued everywhere on their own blockchain.
And there's wild promises being made about how scalable these blockchains are.
You know, we saw Stripe and Paradigm partner up to come out with their Tempo blockchain.
And they're, you know, saying, you know, in front of Congress that they're going to reach 100,000 transactions per second.
And, like, that's an incredible achievement if it were possible.
You know, we're looking at, if you want to look at Solana, that can do 17,000 transactions per second.
You know, completely centralized, you know, like one server, the thing goes down.
But now you're having these wild promises being made.
And the reality is it can't serve the future economy.
If you look just at Google searches per second, it's 189,000 Google searches per second.
So the blockchain solution for your stablecoin is not going to work.
You need something that scales better.
And what Lightning does is it essentially means that you not constrained by proof of work happening every time a transaction is made The cost of a transaction is essentially the cost of a digital signature and it vanishingly small
And that allows you to reach 40 million transactions
per second.
And so that's basically trying to cut through
all the distractions that happen when you have token
incentives, when you've got stable coins,
you've got legislation, you've got all these people
proposing these wild things to attract the payments market. But I think we have to,
like building this technology takes a while. There are network effects to it. There's a reason that
we're still using the same debit and credit card technology that was established in the 1970s.
Payments takes a while. There are many chicken and egg problems. But the reality is, is that
lightning works today. It is very efficient and has a great potential to actually scale and solve
many of the payments problems that are causing our consumer prices to rise.
You want to just touch on Liquid and ARK because they're the two standout ones that
actually stood the test of time and are being used as Bitcoin payment rails and how they
slightly differed to lightning yeah okay so liquid is a side chain so it is a separate blockchain
and you can get scalability benefits out of that liquid also includes some improvements upon bitcoin
that like they don't need to get the global you know uh very intransigent bitcoin consensus
in order to make these changes.
So Liquid has been a bit ahead,
and they have much more Spark contract functionality.
They're also issuing other assets on Liquid.
So super interesting.
But it's not going to be a scalability solution
from what I've seen because, one,
it's not getting a whole lot of usage.
There are token incentives that Liquid is competing against.
um it's not uh the liquid federation is not you know essentially paying exchanges to get listed
which is kind of limited things because they don't have a separate token incentive like all the other
crypto tokens but i think it is um legit uh it's it's a good technology the second um that you
mentioned was ARK. And what ARK does is kind of passing around unconfirmed transactions,
these virtual VTXOs, virtual transaction outputs. But basically, you can kind of move around all the
transactions, and they don't need to actually be settled on the Bitcoin blockchain. You can have
kind of rolling settlement, which makes us trustless. But many of the things that we're
seeing right now, there are some trust elements to it. And especially, well, one thing,
they'll talk about unilateral exit. And that's a key piece of a layer two. So without any input
from anybody, you should be able to exit and get your money back out of the system. Lightning has
that. And it has the forced close. So basically, I always have a signed transaction that could be
ready to be broadcast. And I can take that to the bank. I can get my Bitcoin back on chain.
For ARK, it's slightly different because you're actually having to pay for not just one transaction,
but potentially 17 others or whoever else is in the round. So it could be very
to do the unilateral exit. So some trade-offs are being made.
Yeah. And am I right in thinking that, well, we last saw each other in person in Riga? And
I think they were using ARK underneath the rails for all of the,
we thought we were all paying via lightning when we were buying our burgers
and our beers and whatever else, but it was actually,
I think Rockstar was part of that.
Have I got that right?
Yeah, they were using ARK for settlement,
but they were also using bolts,
which is interfacing between lightning and ARK.
And Bolts is, you know, I think they fly under the radar a lot, but they're helping to interface between these layers.
And it's a good example of the function that Lightning still provides, even if you have these other layer twos, because there's low trust assumptions and you can connect these different innovations that would happen either on Liquid or on Arc, both of which Bolts is actually providing for.
so i guess like at this point many people are trying to figure out maybe how how ambos runs
how how does the business work uh why would people uh invest in it what's the
you know how what's the the business model under the hood
yeah so really uh at our core we have a liquidity marketplace so and what we have ahead is we're
very focused on the innovations with taproot assets to allow stable coins to actually be
issued on Bitcoin natively and also be Lightning compatible. Do it in a way that it's not going to
bloat the Bitcoin blockchain, make a very efficient use of this, but answer a key issue that merchants
are having. They want cheaper payments, but they're afraid of volatility. They're deathly
afraid of volatility. And that's the thing that Bitcoiners love because you have no trust
assumptions. But what merchants want is no volatility. And that's what they get with
stablecoins. They're okay with the trust trade-off, with having an issuer. So that's really where
we're focused so that we can bring not just Bitcoin liquidity to the system and have trustless
payments, but also introduce stablecoin liquidity to actually serve many merchants so that,
you know, for us Bitcoiners, that means you're just being presented with a lightning invoice.
But as soon as you pay that, what's actually happening is in-flight currency exchange.
So this obsoletes the FX market, which settles nearly $8 trillion every single day.
This is just a fundamental technology.
You know, Lightning has been kind of understated,
but it is incredibly powerful
because it's able to do these instant payments
and do the in-flight currency exchange.
It's solving a massive problem
for the much larger companies
that have to deal in multiple currencies.
I've lost your audio again.
What just happened?
You just dropped out again.
Yeah, no, that's right. You said multiple currencies, then it went for like two seconds. Yeah, go on.
Okay. Yeah. Well, for businesses, like, why shouldn't you be able to receive any currency that you want? You just select from a dropdown in the internet age and have 24-7, 365, a financial system that works, when currently the foreign exchange market is 24-5.
there's no settlement on the weekends and this weekend that rolls around the earth
and has banking holidays and all of this nonsense that really doesn't belong in the future financial
system where you have high uptime reliable settlement that just works so stable coins
that this a few people might be thinking huh like you know what what because you said earlier
some people are just issuing stable coins on whatever blockchain.
First of all, they think up the blockchain,
then they think up the token or the stable coin, so-called in air quotes.
But what I think you're saying here is stable coins native on Bitcoin.
Is that the kind of right terminology?
And how do you explain that to people?
Because as Bitcoiners, we're included very wary of stable coins.
and still trying to come to terms with, you know,
is even Tether, like, you know, good actors, bad actors,
you know, the jury's still out, they're still a divisive topic.
Yeah, and then the worry of like a government
or a state actor creating a CBDC as their own stable coin
in air quotes, there's concern.
So, yeah, how do we how do you foresee this?
You know.
How do we make sure that no bad shit comes in, I guess, is the best way to to deliver that question?
There's there's tons of tradeoffs with any of these other tokens.
What we have with Bitcoin is a is a money with no issuer.
what we have with stable coins is a token with an issuer and we have to we have to understand that
like there's a couple of solutions where you can kind of do pegs or you know get creative with
stable channels which you know cool tech but i think what people want is and what we're seeing
with the actual numbers of transactions that are happening is, you know, most of the settlement
is happening with Tether on Tron. Like, as centralized as it gets, you know, I'm trusting
Justin's son to not cave to the government pressure that may come in. You know, you've
got one phone call that could potentially shut the entire thing down.
Now, that doesn't sound like a sustainable system to me.
And so what we can do is basically either natively issue a stablecoin.
So it's someone that's saying, I have these assets that are backing this stablecoin, and I'm going to issue this token on Bitcoin.
or what you can do is take an existing one,
do the taproot asset reference token,
issue this TART that is kind of referencing another token,
a stablecoin that already exists,
but it's not taking on,
now you're kind of sidestepping the risk
that the entire Solana blockchain is going to go down
or the Tron blockchain is going to go down
because what Bitcoin has is really high uptime
and that reliability.
So once that exists in that format, then you're moving around these tokens that are compatible with a Lightning network.
So you're moving whatever currency you want, and it's doing in-flight currency exchange.
That's a tech upgrade that removes trust in these infrastructure providers that we have no reason to trust.
and what since the what's it been now like a few weeks since uh square and cash app announced
that they've like unlocked is it like four million merchants i believe uh what what kind of
what data have you have you guys seen obviously you keep a very close eye on the lightning network
um yeah have you seen anything significant
what we did with rails is you know every customer that we have has their own node and we're we're
tracking and actually reporting in real time all the transactions that are going through
so you can kind of watch this happen um and we're seeing it is an uptick in transactions um you know
the number of transactions and the volume that we're processing is increasing month over month
and this is huge to onboard 4 million people to have extremely low cost payment processing
it's a huge unlock where you can go spend your bitcoin now if that's what you want to do
if you want to spend your stable coins well like what we're working on is kind of you can spend
your your shit coins and it will actually get settled as bitcoin and enabling that in-flight
currency exchange. I think that's, that's huge, because, you know, we're going to have so many
different issuers, we're going to have private issuers, we're going to have government issuers,
and they're going to have to compete in the open market. And kind of the new libertarian in me,
just wants to see that happen. I want the open market to decide, you know, what is the best
currency and you know i have my opinion and i think that's bitcoin um yeah i think time will show
yeah absolutely i think we do and does this tie into um i again this all was going on around the
same time like the drive chain um discussion paul stork was putting out i can't remember the number
of the bit off the top of my head uh is that the kind of thing as well that is that this same topic
I think then like the tagline there was we can.
So the argument was you validate.
Paul was saying we can move all the shit coins onto Bitcoin,
settle in Bitcoin and all the other chains will go away and die.
And we can all live happily ever after.
The pushback was you're validating shit coinery and is going to be an explosion
more and we can have another ICO fest.
And a lot of people are going to get wrecked.
And do we actually really want to attract this kind of attention onto the Bitcoin network?
Have I got that right?
Was that kind of the nutshell argument from memory?
I'm confused whenever Paul Stork opens his mouth.
But basically, he's pushing his BIP, which is BIP300, the drive chains.
And essentially, from my understanding, is more blockchains.
These are smaller blockchains.
I don't know that...
Drivechains kind of allow you to move from one blockchain to another,
kind of back and forth through the protocol.
But I'm not comfortable with that
because I don't like having external blockchains
kind of govern what's happening in my blockchain.
I like the consensus rules.
I like how resistant Bitcoin is to changing.
I like the battles that we have about these things.
And, you know, Paul Stork has made a whole lot of comments about lightning.
And it's been kind of unfortunate.
It's been very confusing for a lot of people.
When the technology is legit, it's been in use for a long time.
And so I don't give too much weight to what he's been saying on drive chains.
And, you know, lightning has failed this type of rhetoric.
right okay so i had it yeah i i think i had it pretty much uh but again like i say i think that
was like fired up about two years ago but it's been around again you know i think that was re-fired
up uh from from even earlier than that uh right so what's um with regards to
ambos in the next five years what what is it like you guys because you just said you come out from before you jumped on here you in the board meeting So I won push too hard I sure there some things you guys need to keep under wraps
But what's the roadmap?
Really is getting the first mover to actually issue a stablecoin on Bitcoin itself.
I think it will be massive.
Tether has already indicated their intention to do so.
They've yet to do it.
But the tech is open to anybody.
So I just posted a blog post on how you could actually go mint your own tappered asset.
And I don't care if it's a stable coin.
I don't care what it is.
But I just want to be able to see this technology in action because the smartest people that have been working on this problem.
And this gives us a path forward to not only unlock payments, but also trading without.
Basically, it means that you could do peer to peer trading without using an exchange.
You could keep self-custody the entire time and you could get paid in whatever currency you want.
I think it's incredible.
There's incredible power in that.
And I think Amboss is meaningfully disruptive to the foreign exchange market.
I think that's really where we're headed.
And, you know, I've believed for a long time that Forex, you know, will become software.
And this gives us, this is the technology that we have to make that a reality.
I think a lot of what Amboss does is really report statistics and kind of watch the growth of this whole ecosystem.
And so we've got a lot of things to report, you know, in the future as this ecosystem evolves so that we can just have Bitcoin become not just the store of value, but also the medium of exchange and the just leverage that trustless, neutral nature that Bitcoin has.
Now, you said you, I mean, like the arguments are a feature, not a bug and the consensus rules and whatever else, which brings us to the topic du jour.
which most people have an opinion on by now.
And that's the core decision to raise the op return limit
up to one megabyte, essentially, from 83 kilobytes.
And the opposing argument to that, like, this is crazy, guys,
just step off the gas, let's keep it as it is,
or even go back to the 43 kilobytes,
whatever it was originally these arguments are important to have like you know i completely
agree with you this is a feature not a bug because you can't just have people you know changing
things whether it's consensus rule or policy you've got to have that open debate but this
this particular one at this particular stage of recording this has got a little bit edgy let's say
um how have you seen that from you know from like the lightning side of things how have you seen all
of this kind of boil over and are you keeping a close eye on it do you do you lean one way harder
than the other what's your take yeah well some of it is is a risk because it's going to introduce
confusion um i mean at this point a hard fork is being proposed which i mean remembering back to
2017 and the block size wars, massively confusing for people just getting into this.
They're getting wrapped up in these arguments about what Bitcoin should or shouldn't be.
And so coming to that point is kind of a disappointment that we actually can't,
we're having difficulty coming to consensus on this issue.
But like through that process, it's always educational because I'm learning about things
about what it would mean to be objective or subjective.
If we're going to change how the Bitcoin rules work,
who's going to be making those rules?
Will it be objective or will it be subjective?
And I know the things that are being issued on Bitcoin
or being put on the Bitcoin blockchain are upsetting to a lot of people.
I think there's spam, these accusations of child pornography
being put on there. And, you know, hate to see it. But I've also learned about this whole field
called steganography, which is basically the ability to disguise any type of information
as another type of information. So, and coming to the reality, you know, after seething,
I'm going to have to cope with this, that you can hide whatever you want in a string of characters
either as pub keys or anything that is like fundamental to Bitcoin.
And you can disguise a picture.
You could put spam on the blockchain and there's really nothing I can do to stop you.
And the more I try, the more what I'm learning is I'm introducing subjectivity and centralized
control into the system.
and so you know i've seen the debate um seen it go back and forth and it is exhausting but i have
learned it is yeah it is certainly exhausting and uh i don know how many more years we be dealing with with it You know we can ever see the future and we can ever know what going to happen
I just, I mean, it doesn't kill Bitcoin, obviously.
It might look different, especially if there's a hard fork.
It will divide us all.
It already has.
It will divide us further.
And for the new people coming in, you're 100% correct.
like it's so damn confusing um it's even for people that have been around for a long time
hard to describe hard to you know analogize uh so yeah i don't know what the answer is um
i personally have lent towards not just because i want to i don't i don't want to take part in
relaying spam and crap that people think is fun and just to troll others they're going to put on
the blockchain. So I've stepped out of that. So that's where I am at the moment. And yeah,
who knows, man? It had to happen, I suppose. Everything happens for a reason. And if we're
going to sit back and look at it objectively it's like okay this i guess was destined to happen
and it's happening for a reason we just don't know what that reason is yet and uh you know i
have full faith that in two years time would have moved on we might be arguing about steel or cast
iron pans again rather than you know the foundational money that we have managed to
discover as human beings.
Yeah, even as uncomfortable as like a, you know, drawn out debate has been in Bitcoin,
like we're still much better off than the type of political discourse that I see in
everything else where people can't even talk to each other.
It's really quite amazing that like we're having technical debates and there's real
trade-offs.
There's engineering decisions to be made and strong feelings on either side.
But overall, we're still using the same money.
This is consensus in action.
And it's inspiring to see because even, gosh, like the figuring out, you know, we've got
recurring, we've got blocks coming in every 10 minutes.
We actually got the entire Bitcoin network to agree to actually move forward with the
taproot activation, which is now years in the past. But basically, that was happening at the
same time that a new president was being elected, how contentious that was. But Bitcoin to me is
inspiring because it actually brings about the...
I've lost your audio again. What happened there?
dang yeah it's inspiring you basically said bitcoin is inspiring um yeah
bitcoin isn't inspiring because it gives us a model of uh like what things could be
um if we could get along if we could have debates um and we could arrive at consensus and move from
there so jesse we're reaching the top of the hour so i will wrap this up because i know you've had a
busy day and it's always fun to ask the the final question and that is if you had one last orange
pill left to give to somebody who would you give it to and why i just get one eh um
let's see um i i i think i would i would give it to those close friends um that that basically
they've heard you talk about Bitcoin and you care deeply about them, but they can't tolerate to
hear one more pitch about why you found the answer that sounds so evangelical to them that
they've stopped listening. And I think, yeah, those are the hardest to orange bill. And so if I could
have one cheat code for that, that's what I would choose. Well, look at that. Even you, who's done
so much great work you know with ambos and uh the lightning network you've still got close friends
who aren't paying attention to what you do in your day-to-day it's crazy isn't it like uh
i i suffer the same fate uh you know those nearest and dearest to you
i i guess you know is it like the the the football player that becomes pro and then you know the dad
doesn't go to every single match whereas growing up he did go to every single match like it just
becomes oh yeah he's a pro now like whatever uh i don't know it's weird but um those nearest to
you they don't want to share in in your discoveries and in i guess they're happy for you
that you've got something that you know you can call a job and uh you know pull a wage from
but yeah it's tough very very tough it's the people that care about you the most that they're
like and them caring uh i wish it wasn't so unpleasant but but basically they're gonna
counter you uh on so many things um or kind of just rely on okay well you already you know researched this for me i don need to do my own thinking on this Both of those are just what happens when people are too close
or they care and that they can't be objective about it.
Yeah.
Well, just to hand people off, where can they find you?
And is there any, I mean, are you guys hiring?
Is there any kind of anyone you're looking for?
Any way other people might be able to add value other than spin up a node and point it to, you know, check out Amboss?
Yeah, I think what we're looking for is we're actually making some moves to get some strategic advisors on board to really give us a sense of like what to hedge funds I need expertise in Forex.
And we're really looking to bring on some strategic folks that could really help Amboss as it matures and kind of enters into this new ecosystem.
But people can always find me on x, jestifer underscore BTC, or amboss.tech, A-M-B-O-S-S dot T-E-C-H.
And you can find out about all the products that we've built in this new ecosystem.
and yeah happy to have conversations with folks if any of what I was speaking about was interesting
to them even road construction workers that might want to reach out and you know get if you want to
talk about potholes I'm always here well thank you so much mate for coming on again and I hope
people get in touch if they've got any questions if not they can reach out to me and I'll direct
them your way will you be in person again anywhere before christmas you heading off or have you
closed down like the conferences for the year and looking into the new year
i'm hoping we can stay focused on building uh but yeah open to some uh conference invites uh it's
always good to be able to deliver messages meet people in person so excellent all right well have
a good day jesse and thanks for coming on it's a pleasure daniel thanks so much
well there you go guys thank you so much for listening thank you again jesse for coming on
the show like i said at the beginning here this is going to be a narrative moving into 2026 about
bitcoin becoming a medium exchange because it is inevitable this thing is here now our species
over millennia have always been drawn to and will settle on the best form of money that is available
to us within the marketplace and that right now undoubtedly is bitcoin the thing is only anywhere
between half to one and a half percent of the world understand that right now right so and i
don't think you need to get much more than five percent uh so we we don't i mean like go listen
to parker lewis go read his book it's called gradually then suddenly he's the best person
at explaining this and uh he's got actually he was on cedric's podcast recently bitcoin matrix so
you can go go and find that bitcoin matrix cedric youngleman that's his recent episode with parker
or you can go back and listen to parker on the once bitten podcast he's been on now four or five
times but we did go through a series of chapters from his book and we do deal with this idea that
Bitcoin is inevitable and why why is that because as human beings we will obviously find the best
form of money that is a natural thing for us to do we understand a medium of exchange is the thing
that lifted us out of the caves and into civilizations as we know them and if there's
a better form of money out there, we will find it. It's that simple. That's why Bitcoin will become
a medium of exchange. I don't know what else to say there. And it's all set up like the Lightning
Network is robust. The Lightning Network is decentralized. The Lightning Network is lightning
quick. And it has been in operation for many years already. Go to one of the conferences
and you'll see it in action.
I've been using the Lightning Network to pay for my beers at conferences
or my merch at conferences, buying books, whatever it is,
with the Lightning Network for God knows how many years.
My brother ran a cafe where he was accepting Bitcoin
for his coffee and pastries using the Lightning Network.
This thing is just going to keep growing and growing and growing.
And if you want to learn more,
Go back and listen to the episode I did with Danny Scott and Dave from B-Hodl or Coin Corner,
because they are working for both.
And they talk about the Lightning Network and the Lightning Network becoming a medium
exchanger as well.
BTC Prague, like I said at the beginning, is going to be focused on this topic.
So get over to the website BTC Prague, use the code BITN, get yourself a discount on those
tickets.
And yeah, there's not much left to say, guys.
stack your sats with Relay
take care of your Bitcoin
please get it in self-custody
bitbox.swiss
forward slash biton
paywithflash.com
to start accepting sats
and I said enough about Club Orange
at the beginning
but just to leave you
on another note here
don't be lonely in 2026
go and find your people
on Club Orange
hit the link in the show notes
thanks guys
catch you on the next show