Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Bitcoin needs to be exciting because it provides a utility that no other technology provides. The value transfer technology and the value transfer technology needs to be embedded in every application in the world. Period. That's super exciting.
[00:00:29] Speaker B: What if the time of Bitcoin's ideological adoption is over?
What if the narrative of the cypherpunks has reached its end, has reached its natural saturation?
What if talking the talk has taken us as far as it can, but what if the tools have also reached a point where we can actually give the user everything we have promised was coming?
What if we can provide cheap, fast, instant, offline payments and a immediate social experience? People can receive and send in a fully, non custodial, sovereign way and in a way that can scale essentially as far as we need it to.
What if that exists today? And what if we also have the tools, we have the AI, we have the Vibe coding capability of using these libraries, these SDKs, to easily build with it, to Vibe code everything that we could want into existence.
And this all exists right now.
What would that mean about what we should be doing and what this era of Bitcoin is? It's long overdue, but I'm very excited to bring Roy Scheinfeld back on the show to talk about the Breeze SDK, to talk about Spark, to talk about the shift they have taken with their SDK and how they think about the role and the place in the user experience and in the infrastructure that their system is, and why Roy thinks they found the sweet spot and they've solved the last mile on nearly every single problem and it's ready to be used. This was overdue. I'm very glad I reached out just in a general conversation about something entirely different, which we talk about in the show, because this was a fantastic episode and it made me realize that some of the tools are in a place that I had not realized they are already.
Things that even I hope to build or implement are actually way closer than I had suspected.
This is going to be a great chat.
Stay tuned.
Really quick. I want to thank our amazing sponsors. We have Leden IO, I have a link down in the show notes. This is for Bitcoin backed loans.
If you're trying to build something and you want to make an investment in this space, a Bitcoin backed loan is your best friend. Your job is to provide more value to Bitcoin, build something real in this space, make that money back and hold onto your Bitcoin because you're trying to add value to Bitcoin. If you have an investment that you know will beat an interest rate but you don't think will actually beat Bitcoin. This is the way to do it. A bitcoin backed loan. Check them out. There's a link down in the show notes and that's a huge help to my show as well because it lets them know that I sent you. Then also for tools to use in doing this Synonym has built a Pub key Pubkey app is kind of a proof of concept, but this is a protocol stack for decentralized communication identity. DNS like all of these things. How do you build the web and all of its services but decentralized and without central control? It's a fantastic and wild set of primitives that if you are a builder you need to look out very closely. Link in details in the show notes lastly and then also Chroma get Chroma co. I still have a 10% discount with them. Bitcoin audible. We just had our second daylight mini, our Skylight Mini come in. My wife is very excited and I'm glad to have mine back because I've been letting her borrow. I ordered late and so it shipped in January.
So I get mine back and excited to have that. They have really fantastic lights. Really. If you're serious about light health, which I think you should be, check them out. 10% discount again. Code right down in the show notes. And lastly, the Human Rights foundation. What they do for freedom and liberty around the world. The people in Venezuela and Machado AHRF is an incredible organization and they have a wonderful newsletter, the Financial Freedom Report.
Subscribe to that, as well as tickets for the Oslo Freedom Forum this year June 1st to 3rd.
You'll find it all right down in the show notes with that.
Like I said, this is going to be a great conversation. I got an enormous amount of value out of this conversation. I can't believe that I did not know a couple of simple things about the direction they had gone that I had heard, but I just didn't recognize exactly what it was.
It's fantastic if you've listened to the show and you know about some of the older tools that we've talked about that you hadn't heard anything about and you were wondering if anything would ever come of them.
And you love the idea of potential for private for ecash in full reserves for offline payments, for basic lightning URL received with no forwarding, no liquidity requirements or issues, simple onboarding and simple payments in any amount or size. And it's just a ubiquitous, basic, easy to implement experience if that's what you were looking for, if you were looking for digital cash in the whole stack and for bitcoin to make that possible, this is the show. This is the set of tools. I want to use this and see if it does. Actually all of those things that we talked about today, but I am more excited than I have been in a while because it feels like the things that we've been talking about for years are actually here now. It's time to Build.
This is Chat157 with Roy Scheinfeld. It's time to walk the walk.
Dude. Roy, welcome back to the show. It's been a minute, man. How you doing?
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's been a while. I can't even remember when there was the last time I was on the show. I think it was at least, I want to say three years ago, but I'm not sure.
[00:07:02] Speaker B: Damn. Has it been long?
[00:07:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. You. Well, you keep reading my article, which.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: Is true, true, true.
[00:07:10] Speaker A: So I, I'm on your show without being physically on your show. But I think the. I think, I think it was 2022 if I, if I remember correctly, last time I was on.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Dude, is that a. That's a bookshelf behind you, right?
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: What's your favorite? What's your favorite. What book are you reading right now?
That's one that's been fresh recently.
[00:07:34] Speaker A: I, I read a book called I Read in Hebrew. So I think it's Gentleman in Moscow and Gentlemen in Moscow.
I don't, I don't read non fiction, which is surprising to many people. I only read fiction.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Fiction's still my dominant. I read a lot of nonfiction, but fiction's still my dominant.
[00:07:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I like kind of what, what literature brings me kind of is the, the. The way to see the world through someone else lens and kind of change perspectives. And I feel that I get that with fiction a lot more than non fiction.
So. Yeah, I read a lot of different genres. I'm not fixated on a specific genre, but everything. Yeah, like, friends and new book is kind of my next tool to read.
[00:08:38] Speaker B: I'll mark that one down. I'm looking, I'm looking for. I've done like two or three non fictions and I always have to break it up with like a good story.
But I agree, you know, there's something, there's something about story. I mean, it's always.
It's what originally, what made me want to be a filmmaker and storyteller originally was, which I'm, I'm not. I'm not like giving up on that. Like, I'm just kind of coming back around to it in a different way.
[00:09:05] Speaker A: But with AI.
[00:09:09] Speaker B: A little bit that's, that's more mostly for like if we want to do a animated film.
Like I think, I think one of the beautiful things about like what AI has done and Vibe coding is actually a great example of the same sort of dynamic is that it's opened up. Like usually you, you have these small, crappy, terrible, low budget projects and then you have like your high budget Hollywood stuff and there's like nothing in between. Like the, the space. There's just this huge, you know, it's like either you're on the 18th rung of the ladder or you're on the first and there's, there's, there are no other rungs in between. You can't sell anything in that, that zone. You can't. It sucks to build. Everything still is super expensive to make and AI has kind of like put a bunch of those rungs back on the ladder.
Is that like we can actually tell a simple and beautiful story for like a 20 minute, 30 minute thing. Then we have platforms like YouTube and Rumble and you know, hopefully things that we have built that actually make it so that we can release it to people and share it out and thousands of people could watch it, maybe hundreds of thousands if it's good and, and we can tell an animated, we can make an animated. You know, I can take advantage of the fact that like I know how to, I know how to use a camera and I know how to put a small crew together and we can film live footage and with not the full set, with not you know, high budget and then we can turn it animated with all of those things that we're missing.
Like we can basically like there was a corridor digital, a really great account online, made an anime and one of the things they did is they like, they made their own costumes or whatever and they made their kind of like environment in some situations. But like literally some of it was just like the shape of a thing. It was like a cardboard thing in the background that was supposed to be a tree or something. And just having that post that, that, that, that kind of like monument to where it is allowed the AI to fill it in.
And it's a, it's a beautiful kind of like green screen without a green screen sort of element of it. So it's exciting. It's exciting. I think, I think we're going to have like this renaissance of new storytellers in the Same way that the music tools or whatever created the renaissance of remixers. And like, you know, somebody posted some. One little thing on TikTok and then like 15 random people come in and they add their stuff and they add their verse. Like, that's a beautiful thing to me. I've always found that utterly fascinating and wholly unique to the idea of the Internet is that you cannot do that without social and without like everybody being connected and having that conversation. And it's amazing to me.
But anyway, I think a lot of that is going to come to storytelling and that's something that I get. I get really jazzed about and I want to. I want to participate in, so.
[00:12:28] Speaker A: And do you think people that weren't creators before are now being able to create with AI?
[00:12:36] Speaker B: Absolutely. Because, yeah, absolutely.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: So it's the same. Yeah, same with coding.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: Yeah. Granted, I think it's the people who have the urge to tell a story. Like, I think AI Slop will always be AI Slop.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But there was always a skills gap and if, if there's always a skills gap.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: You know, if I can kind of mitigate the skills gap, that would be amazing.
[00:13:03] Speaker B: But yeah, yeah.
So, and actually, actually out of curiosity, what's your take on. Before we kind of get into the lightning stuff, what's your take on vibe coding? I just had a conversation with Matt Hill the other day and it was supposed to be about something totally different.
And then we ended up talking for like 20 minutes on the phone, just like, dude, have you been vibe coding? Like, shit, what do you been.
And we just ended up talking about like coding with AI or whatever. Because he was just talking about his productivity. Yeah, through the roof. He just reviews stuff. Really.
[00:13:33] Speaker A: I do everything with viacoding, like every, every problem that I have in my life, like on my professional and personal life, I try to light code a solution. Like, it's crazy.
It changed it absolutely completely change. Changed the way I think about problems.
I'll give you an example. We're working with the LightSparks team. That's the stuff that I've been. Been pipe coding for the past two days. I. We've been working with the Lightspark team on the Spark SDK.
We're trying to plan 2026 now. I need to like, the CTO asked me, the Lightspark CEO, Kevin asked me to give him a list of priorities.
So yeah, before bytecoding, I would have taken a Look at our GitHub, Slack all the part or CRM and partner interaction and kind of compile a List based on urgency, impact, technical showstoppers, et cetera. Now instead of kind of creating this list, I created a mini project that takes the GitHub information that is relevant to Spark the Slack information that is relevant to spark the Slack. Partners from the CRM integrated everything into, into a site that I've built.
I've been doing enterprise software for the past 25 years. I will always work with stuff like Salesforce and it's all crap. I built something in two days and, and, and, and every company that I work with like spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on Salesforce licensing and customization. I've built in two days something that is far better than everything that I ever worked with.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: I love it.
[00:15:28] Speaker A: The ability to kind of to tailor made an app for a specific need.
And it's so powerful and so useful. Also kind of going forward now I solve this problem.
I won't have to deal with documents again.
That's in every problem in my life. I kind of tried to kind of touch solution and it works really, really well. So yeah, like Opus 4.5, like I, I don't know.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: Opus. Opus 4.5, man, I, I build scripts forever.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: I'm speechless.
[00:16:04] Speaker B: In fact I am. I have one modularizing, making, breaking, like really as we talk right now, I'm sure it'll probably take like 45 minutes. So I'm just like hitting enter to make sure like it's doing what I want it to do.
But I'm, I'm doing one that's taking aart a few scripts that I have written separately.
My favorite thing is organizing stuff is building my own custom organization and workflows for the stuff we're doing for the show and to organize through footage.
Like editing, like one of the biggest things of editing is that even if you have a lot of elements, if you have like music or video clips or audio clips or you name a little icons or whatever.
It's so hard to. Especially animations. It's so hard to sort through them.
It is so hard to sort through them. It's just like. It's like going to your storage unit and it's all just nothing. But imagine if you just put everything in like a grocery bag.
You didn't, you know, it's not like, it's not like organized boxes with labels or whatever. You just. Everything was in a grocery bag and you just like stacked them all up and the storage unit is just, just full of crap. That's what I feel like when I go to it and be like all Right. Where's my stuff? I don't know. I might as well just go search it online and download a new version of it, you know, and you know, some of these. One of the really fascinating things about how Vibe coding changes things, in my opinion is that I create software that some like a lot of time wouldn't even be like really something to share. You know, it's like not software as a product, personal. It's just, it's just software a hundred percent for me.
[00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:17:43] Speaker B: You know, like I have a, like I have a personal developer who can just build stuff very, very quickly entirely specific to my situation in my environment.
[00:17:52] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. I do, I do try to generalize a bit. For example, I do do.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: I do. I would like to.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: I did the, I did. I wanted the kind of.
I didn't know which film to watch. So again, like within the vive coding spirit. Okay, how do I. I can Google for new movies or I can build a recommendation engine using my own personal taste in order for me to recommend.
[00:18:18] Speaker B: That's a good one I haven't thought of yet. Oh, that's a great one.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: And I did it like, like, so I did something like a, like Tinder for movies. Like it, it gives you, in order to learn your taste, like it gives you to pick from like popular movies. Then you pick the movies that you like and then it fine tunes and you can add movies that you, you just watched indie films and stuff like that. And then it kind of tunes into your personal taste and it works like magic. I cook with AI, I submit documents to the IRS with a. I do everything.
I AI everything.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: I had a question about your. The recommendation engine is how on the back end are you actually like putting those two together? Because that's something that the, the kind of open source or like self hosted sort of tools really have never had. You know, Plex and Kodi and Jellyfin and these things. And this is something that's actually deeply tied into where we want to go with Pear Drive is like Pear Drive is kind of the app itself is just, you know, how do you make file syncing and file sharing simple and kind of intuitive. But that's the app the core is more about how do you make it so that you can build a bunch of these single purpose apps and have peer to peer, direct peer to peer and like contacts and all of that stuff built in so that you don't have to think about how do you just use it as an API? Very simply, you know, a breeze SDK for ptp Kind of.
And so one of the things though is that like I, so I want to get to the point where I can watch one of my issues is that like I'll have my Plex running on my Linux machine. And especially for shows that our son watches a lot, we hate that we have to bring it up and then he gets all these commercials and some of the catalog will just disappear randomly. It's just like, oh, four seasons of your favorite show. We're just not on this thing anymore. And it's like, you gotta be kidding me. We have to go find it somewhere else. And like I just don't. We want to control YouTube. God knows YouTube will just start playing some random horrible thing. They'll be like, oh my God, please cut this off, my son should not be watching this. You know, and a boil his brain.
And so like we will. I'll download a version of it and put it on Plex so you can watch it. But if my Linux machine goes down, it's all unavailable. And sometimes it does, sometimes I'm going to reboot something or I've used too many a high tools and it's, you know, CR hit the bucket.
[00:20:51] Speaker A: But.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: The beautiful thing about if you did it on, if we build a paradrive version that's, you know, not got all the other features, but it's just literally just a player connected to a drive with some films or media or family photos in it is that if I have another device that's still like my MacBook is still online, that has like 70% of the stuff, or let's say I have this as like, you know, this series that he loves to watch is the important one. And let's back it up on three different machines. Well, if it goes down on my Linux, it's still available from the other two machines. You know, it's, it's, it's BitTorrent streaming but for your devices and for your network.
So like that's like a really critical thing to fix. But one of the things I'd really love to be able to add is a recommendation engine. Is it like, okay, we've watched these things, we like these movies and stuff.
How do we collect our own data, you know, how do we build our own algorithms that these huge platforms have basically sucked up our experience for.
And this is like the perfect little tool, little tool for that because it's so simple. And you could even have like a partner app of like what's your favorite movie? And you could have a session like you like these. What are these 50 movies do you like and you just do a little a tender swipe right and left thing.
[00:22:08] Speaker A: Real quick or readjust your recommendation based on the people that you follow in terms of the.
[00:22:13] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: Other cool.
[00:22:15] Speaker B: That too. That too. Yeah.
But like that's the, that's the beauty of it. So you can, you can all of these things that have been like, it's easy, it's easy.
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Now you have an idea like that. Like it's crazy idea. Like if you had to do that like two years ago, it would require hundreds of thousands of dollars at least and a team of developers. Now in a matter of hours, you can have a working prototype if not a fully featured application.
[00:22:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's crazy, man.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: It's crazy. No, I feel, I feel, I feel so empowered.
Of course there are, there will be costs and there will be Rabi software out there and we'll have to figure it out if, figure it out. But I think the boost that will bring humanities is in our.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: So it's wild. It's wild. Everybody who wants to be. And this is why I think like this is the time to be building privacy tools on top of Bitcoin. Because it's one of the big fights that we are fighting and we are going to have to continue to fight and the only way is to basically out build the regulation.
That's one of the beautiful things about lightning is lightning has privacy, but it's not a, it's not a coin join service. You know, it's just, it's just we put privacy into the protocol.
So when I pay somebody, they do not know who I am. You know, they do not need to know who I am. They need to know that my money is there and it is confirmed.
And I love that. You know, when I, I use for my business stuff, I use wasabi basically every time I go to. I'll leave it in there for a good while and I'll cycle through, you know, a couple of, a couple of rounds or whatnot until, until I move it to my business wallet because I get paid and then I also pay a lot of people in on chain and it's kind of frustrating to do all of that because as soon as I pay somebody, they see the rest of my wallet. You know, like they, they see the rest of like what's going on. They can look at that address and see what it's attached to. And I don't want be able to people to see balances. I don't want people to see like, oh, I pulled this from savings or this is how much I got paid by this sponsor or something like that. Like that I might share that one day. But that's not, you know, it's not their choice, it's my choice.
And so I have to think about that very seriously on chain. And then whenever somebody's like, you know, I have to pay somebody like fifteen hundred dollars or whatever, I always ask can you do it over Lightning? Because I, I keep enough on Lightning because it's just like that just makes me super happy even if it costs me a little bit more because I know I don't have to think about that step.
[00:25:01] Speaker A: You know, just keep in mind that the lightning there are privacy deficiencies as well. Like it's not perfect in terms of the privacy.
Yeah, I'm not sure with the, with the level of nodes and volume and activity that we have now, right now in Lightning, how private it actually is.
So people like the fact that everything is based on HTLCs and HLCs basically share the payment secret between nodes and nodes can track payments. So if you have couple of nodes, enough nodes scattered around the network, you can have a pretty good idea on the activity that is going on. And I wouldn't be surprised if companies like Chainalysis and others aren't oh for sure actively running nodes and trying kind of to understand the, the, the, the flows.
And Lightning is a protocol, but it's also an implementation. So when you talk about lightning we need to ask okay, how is lighting is actually being used? So when they pay you with lightning, how do they actually pay you? Because if they pay you through custodial solutions, of course custodial solutions know everything even. But even if they pay you through non custodial solutions, if they pay you through Phoenix, for example, who does the trampoline payments? They know the destination. So it's very, I, I think the biggest advantage when we talk about privacy and Bitcoin is your ability to own your software, to run your own nodes to run.
Because when, once you start outsourcing it then you always compromise on that always comes with yeah, trust, sovereignty, privacy implications that it's okay, it's okay. Even, even the solutions that we're using, like I brought the LSP model to market lsp. LSP is not great in terms of centralization, it's not great in terms of trust, it's not great in terms of privacy.
But it enables a smoother seamless user experience. So there's always trade offs and, but you need to be very transparent about the trend trade offs. You need to understand and know what's going on. If you care about privacy, I think kind of that's the key, the key message. Don't think because you're using Lightning you're protected, or because you're using Bitcoin, you're protected, or because even you're using Monero, you're protected. Understand if you care about privacy, you need to understand what you're doing.
[00:27:42] Speaker B: Yeah. You have to be, you have to be very pointed and knowledgeable. Directed about what and knowledgeable about exactly what and how you're using it. Because like, you know, it's easy for me to say because like I, I do know all of those caveats and when I am being, when I am actually using something privately when I'm not.
And so I thank you for actually bringing that up because I know a lot of people can actually misunderstand. And my point with using it was specifically in the context of when I'm making payments to somebody is that like I recognize if I use Phoenix, Phoenix most likely knows my destination. I think they actually do the routing.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: If I'm not mistaken, for me it's a trampoline payment. So basically they execute the, they find.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: The route and find my, my receiver and then, and then push that for me.
[00:28:33] Speaker A: So.
[00:28:36] Speaker B: So like I am aware of that in the context of the service, but my thinking, my thinking or my mention of it was purely in the context of like if I pay someone out of my self hosted wallet, they have the address, they can look it up in mempool and then they can see where it came from. If I pay them over lightning, they, they simply can't.
They. They have no idea. And obviously I'm subject to Phoenix or whatever I'm using or like maybe somebody can like pull something together on the network, you know, that's, that's whatever. That's beside the point.
[00:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But in terms of kind of protecting your balance from their recipients, then then yes, of course it's better. Although you can do that in Bitcoin as well if you're knowledgeable, but it's harder for you.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: I agree, I agree.
Let's get into what's going on with Debris SDK. Because the reason I was immediately like man, we should have show was because I asked you this is. Everything seems to be in relation to paradrive these days. I saw and I probably. People are sick of me hearing, sick of hearing me talk about it because I bring it up every damn show. But it's like when I'm spending so much of my Time thinking about and trying to get solutions for and I don't have anything to give to people really. Like we have kind of a, a proof of concept. Like it works but it's so. There's so many and so, so many issues. Like one of the things it literally does right now is which I could, I could fix this in an hour if I cared about it. But we're refactoring so it's like whatever, but it like hashes the entire folder of stuff.
The, the polling is not supposed to rehash. It's supposed to check like modified and size and like a bunch of different things to know if it needs to rehash stuff to get a new file hash. And it doesn't. So every time it pulls again, it literally rehashes stuff. So if I'm like sharing a huge folder but like it's dumb stuff is basically mining my hard drive like Bitcoin.
It's just like ash and stuff all over again.
[00:30:30] Speaker A: You're not using an RC protocol under underneath the the pair implementation.
[00:30:36] Speaker B: Like what's the architecture right now we just have a proof of concept. We're, we're changing a whole bunch of things. We're using Blake 3 hashes. We, we have a bunch of different solutions to this. Like this is not a permanent serious issue and like I said I could vibe code the, the problem out of it very, very quickly.
But it's just funny because I'm, I'm still on an old version and every once in a while coming here I'll be like, oh yeah, I left, I left Paradrive running and I'll, I'll be aware of it because my little hard drive is going but so in the context of Paratrive though, I wanted to ask, I, I reached out to you and asked about receiving lightning offline because I think the no brainer for the future where things are going is like we have to be able to, we have to figure out how to put in monetization and seamless payments into things that have never had it and that always should have. And I feel like the ability to deliver like when people like go up on a platform. Perfect example is Amazon and Audible. Like Audible is a great network. Like I'm not, I'm not even shitting on them. Like honestly they can charge, they can charge what their platform and their network is worth. They have the audio book network just completely like they are the king and they're good at it and I like putting my stuff on the platform but they take 60% and the author and the narrator split the remaining 40.
Like the people who make the content get paid the least on that platform. And that's actually a generally good split.
You look at stuff like Spotify and like music, it's way worse. I mean we're talking like sometimes 5% and then you have a record late. Like you're cutting stuff between so many different middlemen. There should be a way especially in the age of the Internet.
[00:32:49] Speaker A: Of Internet money, right?
[00:32:51] Speaker B: Yes, of Internet money. And what you said about.
[00:32:55] Speaker A: I, I wrote an article the called, I don't know if you read it on your show called the utility of Bitcoin.
[00:33:02] Speaker B: I think I did.
[00:33:03] Speaker A: Essentially one of the claims that I'm making in the article is that applications like these type of marketplaces like Audible, Spotify, OnlyFans, Uber, you mention you, you name, it doesn't really matter which marketplace you're talking about. They're essentially payments apps like the, the core functionality that they provide.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: That's what they are.
[00:33:25] Speaker A: They allow you to transfer money. And at the age why? Because basically payments and the fiat wall thinks about, about the world in, in, in. In the notion of payments and what's a payment? Payments is an instruction to settle a debt. You can't give someone value without a debt.
It can be like if you're a merchant I can pay you. If you're my employee I can pay you. If the money needs to move in a pre authorized designated patterns. Because one, there's no transfer value without a debt. When it comes to the fiat wall, that's one secondly it's not a transfer of value, it's an instruction. You give someone else an instruction to transfer value.
So basically it needs to be pre authorized. So money moves only in this kind of pre authorized patterns. And Audible Spotify onlyfans, what do they do? Basically they authorize specific paths. So if the sender and receiver are on the same platform, then value can move.
What Bitcoin can do and it's not being manifested in a world today, but what Bitcoin can do. And that's kind of where I see the value proposition of Bitcoin. It allows you to actually implement native Internet money value transfer in the way that we have cash in the physical world. When you go in the street and you want to give a handout to someone, you can.
If you want to give your kid an allowance, you can. No one limits you to do whatever you want with your physical cash. And that's the same way that Internet money should work. So if you want to bring it to.
To paradrive. You should be able to bring it to paradrive without any approval authorization for any fintech company or which that take their own cut for allowing. There's a reason Spotify takes 60, 70% and there's a reason that all this because they need to paint the entire chain of approvals, the banks, the fintech companies and so on.
It's a complete mess. And I can't avoid the cliche of saying bitcoin fixes.
[00:35:54] Speaker B: But it does, right?
[00:35:55] Speaker A: But it does. Like the actually thing that bitcoin can fix is bringing back reclaiming cash in the digital world, basically.
[00:36:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And this really is like the thing because we are in the era like you think about it.
I always think about history and like kind of technological eras and where, you know, a lot of people think they're like, oh, the Internet is centralized and it's done. The BitTorrent era or whatever, the decentralized era is over and we're recentralizing. And I always see it as like, no, what centralized and why? Because that's where the next breakthrough is.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's a great framework to think about innovations.
[00:36:35] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we're on this constant stair step of like we break down, we decentralize or solve a problem into this new kind of like more sovereign environment.
But then those things that we didn't figure out, or the pieces that were left undone or the pieces where we didn't even know how we were going to use it, like we were immature in this new space of technology.
Okay, well then centralization finds those solutions quicker by developing a service and then paying for the service.
It's like, okay. And then those get huge and then dependent because it's like, oh, this is, this is actually the way we use the Internet. It's actually social. It's actually, you know, it's. It's about. It's like how to have payment Rails and build. Build networks. And now we have everybody in the middle where they literally own the network. They own our friends list, they own our identity and then connect us. And then because of that, well, what are the consequences? Well, they control it, they can censor it, they can surveil it and they can be in the middle of every transaction. They can charge whatever percent they want.
[00:37:39] Speaker A: Exactly. It's getting more expensive, you're being more dependent, you have less freedom. And then you decentralize that. You have a framework to explain all utility, all ways of kind of interacting with utility in the world. I think it's a great.
It's a great framework on. And to answer your technical question, on a very small scale, it's happening in lightning as well. So if we take a step back and take a look at lightning. Lightning is a solution to speed bitcoin payments, to do them on scale and with instant settlement.
And it started very decentralized.
Everyone can run their own nodes and they will have a peer to peer network of lightning nodes and everyone will run a node and everyone will be able to pay everyone in a completely decentralized manner. Then because the UX didn't meet to the expectations that the users are accustomed to rightfully so then it became centralized through centralized nodes, centralized services and the concept of a lightning service provider, even that didn't provide a sufficient user experience.
So we kind of broke to other centralized services and that's what's going on right now with Spark and R and other sub networks. I call them that. Lightning is just kind of the, what I call the common language. It's the protocol on top of this different sub network. But each sub network is very centralized. So the next step in the evolution of the sub network is that the sub network themselves going to be decentralized and then something else will be centralized and decentralized and centralized.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's this great breathe in and breathe out of technological movement.
[00:39:44] Speaker A: Yeah. It's a common dialectic that happens with every technology enhancement. So I think you're right to put at least kind of the communication software in that prison.
[00:40:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
And because of that specifically I think we're, we're due.
And with the convergence of Bitcoin, Lightning, Arc vibe coding like all of that, like it could not be riper for the move back to undermining the. To thinking about Audible as dated to thinking about Spotify and everything through Apple Icloud and everything through these platforms.
Like, like we're there. Like if, if we're not building and thinking about that then we. You're missing the biggest opportunity I think.
[00:40:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
But again in order to put the things in the right perspective and to apply them to your framework of centralization and then decentralization. So we are decentralizing the front end or even the service itself. But the data is becoming more centralized right.
[00:41:01] Speaker B: Through.
[00:41:01] Speaker A: Through AI that owns basically all the data. So we'll have to decentralize AI and then it will come with a cost of a different user experience and then we'll have to kind of centralize again. So I think it's common dialectics that that happens when you have technology breakthroughs.
[00:41:21] Speaker B: Yeah, I Also want to say just the.
I've always loved the articles and keeping up with everything that you guys are doing. And I felt like the.
The framework, the kind of like mental picture framework that you laid out, I don't know, five years ago now. I like back when, really back when you were starting Breeze more than anything.
And then obviously the language is the common. Excuse me, Lightning is the common language article kind of brought the whole picture full circle.
Um, is just so perfectly and obviously true. In fact, it's obviously. It's so obviously true that it's not even thought about anymore.
Like, people don't even ask can you pay a lightning invoice? Even the people who bitch about lightning or say it's like it's not ready or it doesn't work.
Everybody knows that the only reason Ark is going to be successful is because everything talks lightning. You know, because like you're going to be able to pay Lightning invoices over it.
And I just find it hilarious that it is it before really anybody, before there was any real debate and sense of like, is there going to be competition or which thing's going to be best? Like, oh no, ARC is better than lightning or whatever. It's like, well, no, it's. ARC is only useful if it talks lightning. You know, E Cash is only useful if you can pay a lightning invoice. Like all of it's useless if it doesn't talk lightning already.
[00:42:56] Speaker A: Mm.
It's the evolution of Lightning. So if lightning itself is decentralized, is actually centralized in order to solve user experience issues. Now we found out that we can outsource the technical implementation of Lightning to different.
To different other architect architectures and we teach these platforms, these networks to speak lightning and then they become part of Lightning.
That's basically the reclaiming that I did with Lightning is the common language.
It helps Lightning because it. I think it helps the also kind of the Lightning network. So let's. Let's differentiate for the sake of this conversation. Let's call the language Lightning and the actual implementation of the language Lightning Network.
Okay, so R can speak Lightning, but Lightning network is the nodes, the lightning nodes that. That are connected to each other using payment channels.
So I think if you.
If you focus the Lightning network on what it really does best and basically building the railway railways and the kind of the highways and the. And the.
And the bridges between these different sub networks, then there's no.
That's what it does best. Like that's the forte of lightning. Lightning works well with high frequency channels.
So it works well when it needs to deal with a lot of velocity of payments.
It doesn't work well if you try to bring it.
And we did it like I'm, I, I had to do it in order to understand how can I stretch the limits of technologies. But we tried to bring lightning to every end user and didn't work well. Like it, it, it worked somewhat well, but not to the extent that I can scale it to millions of users.
So if we kind of outsource the end user interaction to a subnetwork and connect the sub network to lightning and lightning connect other sub networks as well. And so we get decentralization, like native decentralization, because users are using different sub networks and even each sub network can be run by multiple providers, then I think lightning shines. And what we see now like the renaissance of lightning is because I think lightning was repurposed to be this type of network like the, the, the, the, the tissue that connects between the different sub networks. And of course it.
Large exchanges, large nodes can interact between themselves to settle. And that's not the problem. The problem is how you scale lightning. And I think once you kind of have the, the notion of lightning is the common language and you understand lightning is the is. The is. Is, is not just a lightning network. It's not just an implementation of this protocol, but the protocol can be extended to other subnetworks with different trust profiles. Then you get the most out of lightning.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: Yeah, no, a hundred percent.
And it's all, it's also funny too is that we have these kind of like rose colored, colored glasses every time we create some large new or a new innovative idea or a new thing. And it's like, oh, this is going to be the thing, you know, like Bitcoin. Everybody's going to use Bitcoin on chain. Everybody's going to have direct like payment directly to their address or whatever. And then that, that kind of runs its course until we start hitting a wall and then we have this big debate and we realize that there's this enormous trade off between that vision and the reality, the reality of actually pulling that off.
And, and then we basically did the exact same thing with lightning. Is it like, oh well, it's lightning. It's like, well and I think also just in standing back is like just look at the financial system, look at the global financial system. Look at the history of money, look at the history of the development of the financial system. Nick Bhatia's layered money is perfect for this. If you just want to kind of get an assessment or a thought about like how many layers and how deeply complex all of this is.
Bitcoin was never going to solve this.
[00:47:29] Speaker A: Problem with money by Lyn.
[00:47:31] Speaker B: Like never.
Yeah, yeah, never.
[00:47:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. But, but like again like I was always try to be realistic and, and, and, and transparent about the, the, the limitations.
But you need to understand that we live in the world. Like I don't blame you, Elizabeth Stark.
[00:47:53] Speaker B: Or.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: So that kind of hyped lightning. Like they have to.
[00:48:00] Speaker B: Yeah, I was about to say you have to, to get to the next point. To get to the next stage.
[00:48:05] Speaker A: Exactly. You need the financing, you need to draw attention. You want users, you want to progress through interaction. So kind of the way that software works these days is to draw attention. So how can you draw attention without typing something?
But I think everyone that was very early into lightning understood very quickly kind of the limitations of lightning.
We tried kind of to, to mitigate it the best we could with bringing new concepts, new ideas, even using mobile notifications or LSPs or running nodes on devices or whatever, whatever was the solution.
But it was kind of very clear and I wrote about it also in some of my articles in the past that the economics when it comes to end user, like the fact that you kind of by design misallocate liquidity when you open a payment channel.
I think we understood very quickly that it can really scale, but it's a, it's a dialect that you have to do with the market and in order to, to allow other ideas and technologies to flourish as well. And luckily now we have, we have very exciting new technologies.
[00:49:40] Speaker B: Yeah. And I also think too in, in a consideration is that it is true up to the point that it reaches its scaling limit or that it, it hits the, the point where the friction is greater than the benefit. You know, so like bitcoin was true that you could do everything on chain and you could do Satoshi's dice and you know, every, well prior to Satoshi's dice really is that you could just have Internet cash and nobody had to think about it. You just sent it and it was cheap and it was, you know, free essentially. And then, and then we hit the point where we found its usage and friction overcoming each other, right? Like where the point where one, one scaled faster than the other and then they cross and you're like, oh, this is not exactly. It's only in this zone over here that this is actually true. And when you hit this zone, a whole different truth emerges. And lightning has that kind of Same element like I've used on chain and self hosted Lightning. But if you're not actually like using it, using it. Like if you're just a casual user, there's a huge like you said, misallocation of resources because you have to offer up liquidity to get them to receive. And one of the ways to get people passively to be interested in something is for them to be able to.
[00:51:02] Speaker A: Receive, but they can't be also receive only.
[00:51:06] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[00:51:07] Speaker A: Because Lightning works with high frequency but also kind of bi directional channel the best.
So if you receive only, that's also an issue.
You need kind of to.
[00:51:19] Speaker B: There needs to be movement, there needs.
[00:51:21] Speaker A: To be activity, it needs to flow like both directions in order for it to be optimized. And that's kind of the definition of a routing node. There's no problem with the routing, with the routing node because by definition inherently that's the function of a routing node. It's. It moves flow on if it moves the funds on both directions.
[00:51:42] Speaker B: But users are different, users are different user.
[00:51:45] Speaker A: Users have different patterns.
So initially I did the SDK, we did an SDK on Greenlight where the node is hosted in the cloud and the keys are reside on the device. And I thought that I'll be able to identify specific patterns and match the right liquidity pattern from an LSP standpoint. So we had kind of a notion of a open LSP model where different LSPs can plug into our SDK and provide liquidity and, and users that end users I thought will be coming from different verticals with different liquidity requirements. Exactly. Like you have like a. Commercial banks and, and private banks and, and retail banks that diff. That offer kind of different financial products depending on their, on their users. I thought we'll have kind of the same mix and match pattern in, in, in Lightning.
But Lightning is very, it might happen in the future, but we're not at a stage that the, that the lightning is so popular that we can verticalize it that level. That's kind of the problem.
[00:53:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
This is not something that's dead at all. It's but like dead.
[00:53:12] Speaker A: It's better than ever. Lightning.
[00:53:15] Speaker B: No, no, I'm not, I'm not meaning, I'm not meaning lightning. I mean this, this way of tackling like addressing lightning to the user.
What would be the postmortem on why you think again, you already hit two points on it basically on why you think that's not the strategy to go at least, at least when it comes to the point that like you're having to. Because I think there's like a couple elements is that the service provider is having to put up risk and liquidity. Yeah. To make the user experience good for the people who are specifically the least involved, the the least interested. And that's the only way to deliver them the experience where they might actually get interested.
[00:53:57] Speaker A: Yes, yes. You need to be at least on par in user experience with other financial products. Right?
[00:54:04] Speaker B: Exactly. Exactly.
[00:54:05] Speaker A: Yeah. If I'm running an E commerce site and I need to choose between Stripe and accepting Bitcoin payments, I want Bitcoin payments to at least, at least the very minimum to have the. Not to mention 10x. But let's say Bitcoin because people want to accommodate Bitcoin and Bitcoin inherently has better properties than fiat money. Let's say that that what drives people for the Bitcoin.
But the experience of accepting money needs to be at least on par with fiat solutions and take a solution like. I don't know if you saw Money Dev Kit.
[00:54:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, not in super depth. In fact maybe, maybe especially for the audience go over it because I had somebody link me to it not too long ago. Was it you? Did you send it to me?
[00:55:00] Speaker A: Maybe. I know.
Very cool solution by, by Nick Slaney, the former.
The. The former LSP guy at Spiral. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So the solution is kind of similar to Relight. Like they run your node on their infrastructure but you still keep the private keys and they hit your server. It's a serverless solution so they hit your service every time you accept the payment for you to accept the payment to actually sign the transaction and send the pre image.
So that's the way that they solve the offline problem in. In Lightning is by targeting users that don't have offline problem meaning people that are running E commerce sites so they can interact with a web webhook to.
To accept payments and they do all the LSP service behind the scenes.
But.
But where it falls short it's not. I think we can optimize the user experience and we did it with greenlight. We did. I think other solutions that are coming based on LDK can can even if you run something in a trusted execution environment in that can that is still considered self custodial.
I mean from a key signing standpoint I think there's a variety of solutions that we can mitigate in order to solve the offline issue. But the basics. The core problem is not in the signing. The core problem is in the channel economics the fact that someone needs to open a channel, allocate liquidity and facilitate the money movement, that has a considerable cost. Especially if they need to do spicing, if they need to close channels, if they need to reallocate the funds that also incurs a lot of cost and by the end of the day it's not the most efficient way to accept payment. So if you take a look at money dev kit I think they're, their fee is 2%. 2%.
That's different than your typical credit card fee.
[00:57:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:57:36] Speaker A: Like so.
So everything comes with the cost.
And I think I always be was.
[00:57:44] Speaker B: Very.
[00:57:47] Speaker A: Prominent about advocating for the best tool for the job when it comes to end user low frequency one direction payment flows.
Payment channels are not the best solution.
[00:58:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I completely agree and I've felt for a long time and we've talked about, I'm probably, I'm sure I probably read a piece of yours that talked about it too.
Is that channel factories like essentially offline channels or, or arrangements where liquidity can move without actually going back to chain. Yes, where you know a service provider or someone can open a channel with me and you and then if you end up needing the receive more receive capacity than I do, it can just be taken from me and delivered to you without actually going to the chain was always a necessity. Yes. Like from the, from the very outset the economics of lightning demanded that that has to happen or there's going to be the liquidity cost of actually running the lightning network. It's going to be like over. It's going to be like 3x or 5x reserve always just to fulfill basic payments and that just is unsustainable. The, the, the cost, the time cost of, of having liquidity locked up.
[00:59:10] Speaker A: Liquidity like I, I look at personally, personally like for Breeze we allocate hundreds of bitcoins in order to facilitate end user interaction. It doesn't scale. And another article I wrote was about Spark and ARC being the channel factories we always wanted. So another way of looking at these sub networks that I, I, I was mentioning, these are basically channel factories.
Like you call them arc, you call them Spark, but basically essentially they're channel factories. The channel factories. Yeah, it's the channel factories, the next gen channel factories and that's the way to coordinate liquidity offline but you're still connected to Lightning network and every channel factory can have different implementation, different trust assumption and whatever but basically there are channels. Like if you are familiar with the concept of channel factories, these are fulfilling.
[01:00:08] Speaker B: The goals of exactly what they do. Yeah, that's exactly what they do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, a hundred percent. A hundred percent. That's the whole idea of the sub network.
[01:00:19] Speaker A: They can do more. They can do stablecoins inside the factory and they can do offline scripting inside the channel factory. They can do a lot of other cool features that kind of out of the realm of lightning, but still in the sense of moving value in the lightning network. These are channel factories.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So I wanted to ask them because this is the question that I asked you that got me thinking. Okay, we should, we need to test this out here or have a conversation about it is because in Pear Drive specifically, obviously I do want to implement Bitcoin, but I know nobody's going to use it if it doesn't, if it doesn't meet the expectation of just like easy to use offline payments like basic and like, I can certainly, I can be a quote unquote service provider. Like we could put up servers and stuff, especially through Pair Drive because you know, we wouldn't necessarily need a DNS. We could have a distributed thing that's on a bunch of different machines spread across. So I, I could probably be a service provider easier than, easier than most just because of the idea of paradrive itself.
But I would like to avoid the regulatory hurdles. I don't want to do KYC on anybody, you know, and it's not even, it's not even just that I'm philosophically against kyc, it's that I don't, I don't want that responsibility. I don't want to be holding thousands, hundreds of thousands of users, millions of users, data like, God, Jesus.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: Also, you want to pay the licenses fees for, for FinCEN and like it's crazy to have a regulated service.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: Like, it's insane. It's insane. So that's not what I want to build, you know, like, that's not the realm I want to play in. And unfortunately to do anything.
[01:02:11] Speaker A: That's why you have one audible, one Spotify, one Uber.
That's the reason this platform are centralizing the moat is the, is the facilitation, like looping back to the beginning of our conversation. The moat is the payment. Rails. Actually it's not about the tech with Vibe coding.
Of course it's not about the tech. It's just about the infrastructure to facilitate value transfer.
[01:02:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. A thousand percent. A thousand percent.
So I asked you, obviously my, my top three of like, well, usually my first of like, okay, what's, what tool do I use in Life.
[01:02:57] Speaker A: The other. Who are the other two?
[01:03:00] Speaker B: Probably Matt.
Matt Hill. I, I request a lot of details on just because he's. He plays with a lot of tools like me and he's always getting stuff on start N.
But, but anyway, so it's like how do I accept Lightning or how do I implement Lightning and specifically and. Or hopefully Noster compatible, which we might have to build a nip or something for. For some stuff because Liquid is not Noster native. But I would love for that to kind of be a part of the story too.
But what's the best way to do this offline? To have these things talk together? And that's when you brought up the changes that y' all had done that I wasn't even aware of and how y' all have integrated Spark and even a Spark token, which I didn't, I didn't know about that I wanted to give you.
Basically I'm giving you that same question again and I want you to expand on, on the answer that you gave me so that I have full picture in my mind.
[01:04:03] Speaker A: Sure. So. But before I kind of drill down into your specific problem, I just want kind of to have a, to give you an overview about where we are as a company because there's a lot of misconceptions like the fact that we're, we're. We're a Lightning company and everything that we're doing is with, is with us putting the Lightning cap on.
We talked about Lightning evolving from Lightning Network to Lightning as a language. So Breeze as a company also evolved from, from being a Lightning Network only implementation to implementing other subnetworks. So we had the Lightning native SDK based on Greenlight.
It didn't meet user expectations. It didn't meet our expectations in terms of reliability and performance. So we deprecated Greenlight. And now through the help of and support of Steve Lee, we're working with Spiral of Re implementing a native SDK based on ldk.
But this is something that is still in the works. Hopefully it will be released later this year and we have two additional SDK. So the way that Briz is operating now, it's not a single implementation solution. We have multiple multiple SDK implementation and we allow our partners to pick and choose the best solution that meets their criteria. Because the future is, as you said, decentralized. I don't think we'll have kind of one sub network that controls the entire network. I think the future of Lightning is connecting different multiple subnetwork.
[01:05:54] Speaker B: I think we will have sub networks like we have sub Networks on the Internet like lands.
I think there will be or I think it will be like how many.
[01:06:03] Speaker A: Businesses are there out there or country cities, apartment building? I don't know.
But that's exactly what we're thinking of.
So we had our first implementation of this kind of sub network. Vision was a liquid. So we've built a liquid SDK based on essentially atomic swaps that are provided by the bolt folks and we released that to market and it really took off from a kind of product market fit go to market standpoint.
It really met the user's expectations and our A partner's expectation. And we started getting a lot of implementations on top of liquid. But liquid has its deficiencies. One of them as you've mentioned, is kind of. You called it Noster compatibility.
Basically it's the ability to send and receive the R minimums in liquid. You can't send below 21 sat and you can't receive below 100 sats and that makes it and Noster incompatible. But I think a bigger challenge is the fact that you don't have unilateral exit in liquid, meaning it's not a true Bitcoin. Basically you're using lbtc, you're not using, you're using pegged Bitcoin and you need to trust the liquid federation in order to facilitate a transaction.
[01:07:33] Speaker B: It's a semi decentralized bitcoin peg. Bitcoin stablecoin, it's a federated bitcoin stablecoin. There you go.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Which is good to some extent. But I can't say that I was kind of completely happy with this trust profile alongside with the minimum limits that you have to send and receive and the fact that you don't have a true instant settlement. It's basically for large amounts you need to wait for liquid block confirmation, which is faster than Bitcoin. It's a minute instead of 10 minutes on average. But still like doesn't make sense to wait a minute for, for large payment because under 100k sats you have zero control.
But it does other things very well. For example confidential transactions, you do have confidential transactions on liquid, you do have USDT native USDT on liquid. So it has its pros and I think every sub network will have its pros and cons.
But I didn't want to settle on the, on the, on this solution alone because the future is not a single vendor solution or single sub networks solution.
And with the emerging technologies of specifically ARC and Spark, we started looking into implementing other subnetworks and we started with Spark, working very closely with the amazing lightspark team and we brought the Spark SDK to market.
Spark has a different trust profile than liquid and.
But it does have unit or exit. So it's a true layer two.
It doesn't have minimums amount to send and receive and it does support.
To finally answer your third drive question, it does support offline receive. Because of the nature of how Spark is implemented, I can go into more technical detail on how it actually works, but it's a very cool.
It's very cool in that regard.
You do need to trust the.
It's called the Spark entity, not a federation. In Spark is a Spark entity. You need to trust the Spark entity. Spark is based on a Station model. In Station, you need to trust the entity that runs Spark Agency.
[01:10:20] Speaker B: State chain. Yeah, okay.
[01:10:23] Speaker A: It's actually an evolution of station. It's a federated statechain.
[01:10:29] Speaker B: So I did not know. This has been. This has been driving me crazy because I didn't know and I didn't find an exact answer to this in the explanation. I don't think I saw anywhere where it said state chain.
But I have heard about Spark multiple times. But I had no idea there was a unilateral exit.
And I thought it was a slightly greater trust trade off LSP type model, but I did not realize it was state chains. That's that. I have a totally different impression of this now. Okay, okay. Because I know, I know state chains. We've talked about statechains, so think about.
[01:11:06] Speaker A: It as a statechain with two improvements. Basically. One, you don't have a single entity that runs the statechain.
You don't have a single coordinator.
So you have a Spark entity. But the Spark entity is comprised of multiple Spark operators.
So they brought this model based on Frost.
[01:11:27] Speaker B: Like, are you guys an operator in this Mike? Are you part of it?
[01:11:31] Speaker A: Not yet. But we want to be an operator.
We want to be a Spark operator in order to mitigate the trust because the trust model in Spark you need to trust with one out of n operators during the course of a transaction. So one honest operator is enough for you to trust Spark. And I trust me.
So I want to be an operator because an operator.
[01:12:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:07] Speaker A: So this is very cool in that regard. So the multiple operator is an innovation that lightspark brought to Station. And another thing very cool innovation is the. Is the trip model that they created invented.
So I don't know if you remember kind of the previous implementations of State Champs, but you have to have like the denomination, you had to know it in advance. So in order to pay, you had.
[01:12:37] Speaker B: To break it all down into the little pieces to. Exactly.
[01:12:40] Speaker A: In order to swap.
[01:12:41] Speaker B: Move those pieces around.
[01:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah, to move these pieces. So they do that dynamically because the kind of the building their own 3 model. So if you hold some funds, you can dynamically break that and pay the necessary amount.
[01:12:55] Speaker B: So you just like create the hash tree as you. As you break up.
If you have, if you have 10,000 sats, it's just one unit. But if you want these 200 sats specifically, you just break it down to the hash of this and those 200 and.
Oh, that's great. That's great. That's fantastic.
[01:13:13] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. And it works.
It's worked fast. It works reliably. It works really well. And I know a lot of people kind of don't understand the light spark. Like it's like an alien to them because they're not. They didn't grew in the bitcoin from the bitcoin ecosystem and they kind of outsiders. But I'm telling you guys, it's a team that can execute.
So they understand bitcoin very well.
They innovated on lightspark, on Spark, they made a few iterations and they unlocked very nice issues that we all thought were blockers.
And it's a great team and it's been a pleasure to work with. And we're kind of now shipping the first production solutions to market based on Spark. And it's an absolute magic.
[01:14:13] Speaker B: That's awesome. Does it still have statechains as I remember it when it was. When I was looking at. Was it Rubens implementation?
[01:14:23] Speaker A: Well, what's the name of.
I forgot the wallet?
Miranda?
[01:14:30] Speaker B: Mercury.
[01:14:31] Speaker A: Mercury, yeah.
[01:14:32] Speaker B: Mercury. Yeah. In fact, I probably still have some stats on Mercury, but is. Is that it had blind signatures, Is that, is that correct? Is that still the case? Like what's the privacy profile?
[01:14:44] Speaker A: So, okay, so the privacy is. Is not. So it continues to. To improve, but it's not ideal.
[01:14:53] Speaker B: Sure.
[01:14:54] Speaker A: Currently when we started there was zero privacy and everyone could see your transactions. And I mean everyone. Like if you coming back to the, to the problem that you've mentioned earlier.
[01:15:10] Speaker B: It was like on chain bitcoin, it.
[01:15:12] Speaker A: Was even worse than on chain bitcoin because it didn't have address rotation. So imagine.
[01:15:20] Speaker B: Oh wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's an account based sort of.
[01:15:23] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
And since then we improved that and now your account is hidden from outside. From outside. Like optionally, you can hide your account from external spectators, but it's not private for.
You're not private for the Spark Operator. So unlike Liquid where you have confidential transaction, your transactions aren't confidential in the context of Spark Operator. So the Spark operator is.
Your transaction is completely visible to the Spark Operator.
But the Spark team is working on confidential transactions as well.
[01:16:07] Speaker B: Beautiful.
[01:16:08] Speaker A: So this is something that we're looking to improve in 2026.
But people should know that currently if they want, if they think their. Their transactions are private in the context of a Spark Operator, that's not the case. It's kind of like Phoenix, like the trust model. If you compare to an LSP model, it's kind of like Phoenix.
[01:16:30] Speaker B: It's like they route for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.
[01:16:34] Speaker A: And your transactions are visible to. To, to the operator basically.
[01:16:40] Speaker B: And I genuinely think too that even. Even in the non custodial model, which is so cool. I really had no idea the level. That's just super exciting that it's. That it's state chains. I really did not know this.
And state chains interacting with lightning is, is fantastic. That's.
[01:16:58] Speaker A: That's wonderful.
[01:16:59] Speaker B: Wonderful combination. It's as good or as interesting to me as arc. And I've just mostly been.
I think I like. It's been so quiet on state chains. You know, like I use Mercury but like there was no, there was no like uptake of it. Like you know, you know, I couldn't use it anywhere.
[01:17:15] Speaker A: I also think the team moved on from Mercury.
[01:17:18] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:17:19] Speaker B: I think they built it as a proof of concept and then they were like okay, cool, we did it and you know, just did other things.
[01:17:25] Speaker A: Yeah. By the way, when you talk, when you say arc, I know we use ARC as a codename but there's two arcs. There's.
There's Bark by Secant and there's Arcade by ARC Labs.
[01:17:38] Speaker B: Arcade is the one that I specifically have been focusing on and Arcade.
[01:17:41] Speaker A: I love Marco, I love ARC Labs. I like the team. And that's another SDK that will develop. We'll develop an SDK based on Arcade specifically.
[01:17:51] Speaker B: Nice. Nice. I didn't. I don't think I know about Bark.
[01:17:55] Speaker A: Bark is an implementation by secemp.
[01:17:59] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:18:03] Speaker A: What's. Kevin and Eric are running second?
Yeah, it's also kind of a very cool company. Cool technology.
But I think they're on Main Net yet.
But yeah, we might do a.
A Bark implementation as well. I just like working with the ARC Labs team as well. Like Marco and Cooks and the entire team is just been executing like crazy.
[01:18:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. For sure. I don't even remember who.
We reached out to a couple different people. I think we're going to be doing a show on that you should, you should talk to. I believe somebody said that they can come on. I don't know, we haven't scheduled it yet but we're going to be doing a show on Ark pretty, pretty soon.
[01:18:55] Speaker A: And Ciao Marco. It depends on. Ciro is a surname but everyone calls him Chero but he's fantastic.
[01:19:06] Speaker B: Awesome, awesome.
So you need a different SDK for each of these things. Right. And so in the context of Spark.
[01:19:14] Speaker A: We have partners that are using multiple SDKs by the way, we have, we have partners that are bringing Liquid and Spark into a single app.
[01:19:25] Speaker B: Okay. Okay. Because I did see that I think in the thing about it in the blog actually.
But so let. Walk me through the user experience for this when.
Oh actually let me make a note on privacy is why I think it's critical to, to do a blind signature thing and, and, or confidential transactions is because I really feel like the battle is going to be that if privacy is not built in to the very thing that is being run, especially when it comes to like let's say I wanted to be a provider and I wanted to run it.
If there is not privacy, even if it's non custodial, I feel like there, there will be an enormous regulatory push to say you have to kyc.
[01:20:17] Speaker A: Non custodial is not, is not a requirement for licensing. If you read Mica or you read, if you read the fincent, it's not about self custody or, or, or self hosted, it's about the facilitation of a payment. So if you're a payment facilitator you're at a regulatory risk of, of, of requiring a.
So you're absolutely right.
[01:20:46] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's why I think that if they come and they say you have to do this but then the way it works just like, just like lightning. But if you just like if you say I can, if, if we basically depend on the software, it's like I can't, I don't know, I don't know how to do this. You know that's why we have determined who is using this.
I can't determine like, like other people can join. It's just software. Yeah. You know like they, they can boot this up and they can start using it and they can, they can attempt to go the route of well, you can't let people connect. You can't just have this open and available on the Internet. But that's a different conversation when it totally changes the game. If you have privacy or blind signatures by default, 100%.
And that's why I think it's crucial. Crucial.
[01:21:32] Speaker A: That's why we'll have confidential frontend.
[01:21:35] Speaker B: Exactly right.
[01:21:35] Speaker A: Both on Spark and Arc like that. That's exactly the reason we'll have it.
[01:21:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Love it. So walk me through. Let's say I'm using the. The SDK for Spark and that's the one that I end up deciding on. And I want to be able to have users who can be zapped on Noster or receive zaps and do general payments throughout the application where I could be a provider if maybe I wanted to, but I don't have to. I'm just hands off. I'm just providing this to people as an easy tool.
Walk me through the process. Walk me through the. How the user thinks about backups and key generation and like this sort of thing. Like what's the. What's the user experience and the, the trade off.
[01:22:23] Speaker A: Okay. So in terms of kind of implementing the SDK, it's really super, super easy. Like we went from weeks partners like taking weeks to implement to partners taking days to implement. Now we have partners taking hours to implement. I mean to production. Like we had a partner that it took them a day from requesting API key to going live to production.
[01:22:53] Speaker B: That's great.
[01:22:54] Speaker A: That's crazy. But takes the developer experience is easy. Like you have a send payment API or receive payment API and you just embed it in your products wherever you think you want to embed the value transfer flows.
The backup is something that is actually. So it's still mnemonics. Like you need to save your mnemonics, you need to save your seed. But we're actually in the process and we have an open PR on a new protocol that we are doing called the seedless Restore where we are using task keys to.
[01:23:38] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:23:38] Speaker A: To give you like a passkey option in order to simplify the. The authentication. It works with passkeys, PRF functions specifically and. And Noster as well.
So it's sweet.
[01:23:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that makes that really easy, I think.
[01:24:02] Speaker A: But Noster is kind of behind the scene. Like you don't need Noster. Like everything is kind of being implemented, created.
Basically we take the PRF of passkick and derive deterministic mnemonics and when you do that, you can derive from that an offster account and you can derive from that the Spark private key.
[01:24:27] Speaker B: Perfect. It's literally what we do on our side is essentially that and we also don't like, like the user won't really know there's Nostr unless they have some sort of technical understanding. And you know that that's not really what it's about. It's about accounts and the ability to post publicly if they, if they choose.
[01:24:45] Speaker A: By the way, that's where Nostr shine. Like people don't understand. Exactly.
When people think about Noster as this social alternative to X or like this social, this social app. Noster is a public subscribe protocol and it's super, super powerful. If you need to interact with information, if you need to interact with data in, in kind of in this architecture of public subscribe, it's, it's perfect and you can create and especially if you're coming from crypto and you have this notion of keys, private keys, it's very easy to implement.
[01:25:25] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. And that does. It's another one of those things where I feel like people have this like dichotomy of like these two different spaces. It's kind of like, like I was talking about the Hollywood versus the home video type thing is that there's just these two worlds and there's no ladders and there's no rungs in between. Well, I feel like we have the same arrangement or the same thought about things in our head of it's either full public, like posted on X social media, where you're just broadcasting out to the whole world, or it's like mine, like when it comes to like files and like, like big data and there's like. No, there's just nothing in between. You know, there's, there's no scope. It's like. But well, social is social and sharing and payments and everything exists on all of those rungs. It's just that the entire 15 middle rungs are centralized platforms. It's like attack the 15 middle rungs, put. Put those rungs back in decentralized and sovereign and you've got a use case and you've got a UX that nobody else can match because it's literally something nobody else. It's not being done anywhere. It's not being done except through Apple or Google. And it's awful through this. It's awful. The number of times that I just be like, all I have to do to quote unquote, sell Pear Drive to normies or the idea of it is just like you could just do what you do with Google Drive except without Google, you know, like.
And that's not even the scope of it. That's just the beginning of it and, and all that's all you have to do. And do people like, oh God, I hate trying to decide who can do this. And like I share stuff and I'm like, oh my God, did I just share the wrong folder? Who even looks who can see in this thing? That I'm sure, like my, my sister in law said she has this problem sharing videos. They, she records, she has dance lessons and they do classes and she does custom choreography. Really good at it.
And she'll do videos every once in a while and then she'll share it with the class and, and everybody. It'd be like, oh, I'm. I'm trying to get this video or something. And she'll accidentally sometimes sub share something inside of it with somebody she didn't intend to, which is like, it's no big deal, it's a dance video. But she'll be like, how did they get access?
And then also it only shares for like 30 days and then it all expires. And then like every once in a while she's a bunch of texts from people like 30 days later.
[01:27:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:27:47] Speaker B: Is like, hey, I can't. Where's the video? Can you post it back up? And she has to like take time out of her day to go upload it again and do another. It just. It, it, it sucks. It sucks.
[01:27:56] Speaker A: It sucks.
[01:27:57] Speaker B: Anyway, sorry.
[01:27:58] Speaker A: No, no, I agree. I, I suffered. I, I went skydiving a year ago and I tried kind of to look for the file. Like I recorded it, they recorded it for me and the file expired. Like, who knew the file would expire? Like, what the fuck?
[01:28:14] Speaker B: So stupid.
[01:28:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:28:16] Speaker B: And it's still out there, still out there in like a bunch of places. Like imagine like how easy is it too, is that instead of having it, like obviously I could still just host it myself. But if like you've got a class of like 30 people and 20 people download it and then two of the remaining 10 that didn't download it come back in 20 or 30 days, there's 20 people who have it. And even if the original thing, there's 20 people who have it download it from them. Like why can't you find it? Like, and just so that, that's the thing that drives me crazy is that this is not a hard problem to solve.
[01:28:47] Speaker A: And I think people are sleeping on Noster in the, on, on, on, on.
As a, As a developer primitive, basically a hundred percent. I think a lot of developers need to start thinking on how to utilize Noster or their infrastructure just because it has relays it has kind of this basic model built in and figured out and, and. And it's not perfect. It doesn't mean that we can't iterate on having specific relays for specific features or. I think.
And I think Noster also can be advanced in. In. I think the protocol is good enough, but I think it needs to be more professional in terms of it. In terms of backups, redundancy, fault tolerance, et cetera. Like, there's a lot to do in terms of it when it comes to nostr, but let's do it.
But the primitive, like the fact that it gives you out of the box, very programmable, very, very easy to use model, I don't see how it won't be successful.
[01:30:00] Speaker B: That's the thing too, is that I've thought, um. And this is another very serious configuration with PEAR Drive, because I run my own relay for Noster that I let. Well, I. I take that back. I. Well, I mean, I do have a Star nine where I just do my backup, but it's not one that people can connect to because it's not live on the Web. Right.
But I do have utxo, a friend who's built a bunch of really cool tools, also had a service where you could pay to host a relay for a public relay. And then I had shared that just with the audionauts so they could connect to it. And it just keeps a small subset of stuff. Right. It doesn't exactly. It doesn't keep the global thing.
[01:30:48] Speaker A: It's a tailored relay for your purpose. Yes. That you optimize for your. Exactly. I think that's.
That's the right way to think about.
[01:30:58] Speaker B: I love that the relay model actually is part of nostr because it's a.
It means that it's agnostic. NOSTR doesn't really care how you get the information. The relay network is just kind of an easy way to bootstrap it. But I've always thought that the relay model, the way relays work, was absolutely critical to solve.
Like, that there needed a very, very important solution because. And I didn't realize how bad it was. Like, I always knew it was, but until I was talking with. I think it was JB or something, left a comment, I can't remember who it was, but with him and Thomas, I.
Somebody. We were talking about this with somebody, and everybody was like, no, relays are fine. It's great. Or whatever, and we can just arrive on donations. I was like, that's not. That's not gonna work. Like you. We're Talking we have a small network, you know, 100,000 daily active users or something. And I know, you know, upwards of, there's, there's gotta be a thousand dollars a month on just bandwidth and hosting costs for relays that are basically just, just storing forward on all of this stuff. And bots can run that call stuff a lot. And JB came in. It's like, that's funny that you think it's only a thousand dollars. Like, or whoever it was that you know, posted it, I was like, God, it's worth even. Because I, I don't, I don't host something like that. So I don't know the cost, I knew it was going to be high. But the fact that $1,000 was funny, I was like, this is a much bigger problem than even I, I realize.
[01:32:32] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, value has cost for sure. But what's your alternative to relay? Like the only alternative to Relay is or the no model is a centralized server.
So either you have a centralized service or you use Noster. Like I don't think you have any other way to bootstrap a service these days.
[01:32:49] Speaker B: You're right, you're right. And I, but I think relays shouldn't be thought of as historical databases.
Like they should be just live forward for the network. Right. They're just, they're just broadcasters of the mempool. That's, that's how I think the best way to.
[01:33:05] Speaker A: Yeah, the gossip kind of the gossip layer in, in, in lightning. They.
[01:33:10] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[01:33:11] Speaker A: They spread the information in real time. But I think you will have professional tailored purpose. Absolutely relays for absolutely persistency, storage, backup, fault tolerance, et cetera, et cetera. So I think, but someone will have to pay for these professional relays to run.
So Ether package as a part of a service, let's say Breeze SDK is now using Noster in order to implement a seedless restore service.
I need to offset the cost of running a relay in making money from the SDK.
And that's okay. I think it's doable.
[01:33:56] Speaker B: I think there's another layer and this is me again talking about Paradrav again. But the reason I think there's another partial and I think very critical solution to this is that if every feed, if every individual person's like feed is a topic on a peer to peer network is that you don't necessarily have to connect to one relay or one device or something. You connect to the seeders of that topic.
So like everybody's thing is an RSS feed, but then everybody who follows that RSS feed has the information that you're looking at for.
So it's, it's BitTorrent, right? You know, if there's a thousand followers of this one person, well you don't have to connect to that one person to get their new posts. You connect to any of the thousand followers who are present to get it. And then specifically you have, you, you can partner off your own devices. You know, like you check your local DHT first. Like because in paradrive we build a DHT just for you and your devices and then you have the, the public one as well and you also check your local devices. Did any of my other devices pick this up already? Did my start nine already? Look, find these posts or whatever and put them in chronological order and you know, that sort of thing.
[01:35:16] Speaker A: I don't know why there's no peer to peer implementation of NOSTR as well. Like I think relay can be because.
[01:35:23] Speaker B: We'Re not done and nobody else appears to be doing it yet. I don't know.
Okay, I'm, that's, that's a big part of what we want to do. I, I, I love noer and I really want to make that, that drop that cost significantly and you know, maybe, maybe it comes with trade offs. Like we'll, we'll learn as we go. You know, maybe it comes, it looks like you know, giving use end users channels. You know, like maybe there's a caveat there that it, it doesn't work in full. But I'm also not afraid of central servers. I'm not afraid of like services. Like it's totally fine if somebody wants to offer up something on the network and then you pay for icloud service from that user. Like why, why wouldn't you? You know, like servers have a use case. They're, they're a critical service to keep things, keeping things online. I think they should both be married into the same world, into the same protocol or language and you just need to remove the payment centralization so that anybody can do it.
Anybody can be a host, anybody can be a payment provider, anybody can be a payment receiver, you know, whatever.
So slowly but surely, slowly but surely long project that takes up enormous amount of my mind. But.
[01:36:41] Speaker A: But you enjoy doing it.
[01:36:43] Speaker B: Oh I fucking love it. I love it, dude. I would honestly I have even considered pausing the show for, for like two to three months just so I can go ham like just like full on. This is all that I do until we get it out and then the next episode be this is done. Like, like we, we have Finished our fourth or fifth refactor, whatever it is, and it's finally got all of those kinks worked out and I think it's ready for other people to build on. And that's why I haven't like really, really pushed the fact that it is actually on GitHub. The, the proof of concept is out there, but I don't think people should really use it. Not only are we going to break it, but it's just there are, there's a lot of duct tape in it and obviously that's just, it's just not production ready and that's why I haven't really liked. I don't link to the GitHub ever. Like, I'm just like, if you find it, you find it cool. Look around and see what it does. But that's not, that's not the one you're going to be using, so.
But, but yeah, I love it. I'm consumed with it.
[01:37:45] Speaker A: Yeah. But just consider, Guy, that perfection is the enemy of progress though. So don't wait. I feel it will be kind of. Oh, yeah.
[01:37:51] Speaker B: Oh, it's not gonna be perfect. Yeah, it's not gonna be perfect. Don't. Don't get me wrong. I know. I understand that lesson too. I do, I do.
[01:37:58] Speaker A: Good enough is good enough.
[01:38:00] Speaker B: Good enough is good enough.
But there were just some very, very low level primitives that I thought we would bolt on after and they just needed it to be at the bottom and so, so we had to go back to the bottom. And then we were trying to figure out how to like, okay, how do we take this and now stick it onto the new thing? And it was like, no, we really just kind of have to rebuild up from here. It will be released when there are still kinks and still plenty of work to do. But again, it's just without a couple of core primitives, it just wasn't.
It's not quite ready yet. Not quite ready yet. We're, we're shooting for end of January, sometime in February maybe. Deadlines are whatever they are, but we're moving much, much faster this time and we know what we're. I feel like we have a real picture of what needs to be there before we can start iterating based on how people are using it. Because obviously I can't possibly assume that people will use it the way I think they're going to use it.
I won't know that until months of people telling me this sucks.
[01:39:01] Speaker A: Great thing about AI is that you can test everything really, really thoroughly.
[01:39:06] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[01:39:07] Speaker A: The stability is like one of the biggest advantages that you get.
[01:39:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing.
So the how does with state chains back. Back to Spark? Because now knowing it's state chains, I have a completely different impression of it now. I'm kind of like full on. That's fantastic.
[01:39:26] Speaker A: What gave you kind of the initial impression?
Because perception is of spark is big part of the bitcoin discourse. It's all about perceptions now.
There's no real talk even the kind of the filter discussion or every new discourse that is happening on the bitcoin ecosystem. Everything's kind of people are talking past each other and it's all about reception and not actual technical detail.
[01:39:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, I think it's just hard when something is a service.
Like I'm inclined to think that it's like a bridge and I thought it was more like what's the.
What's the one that gets used a lot? I think Aqua Wallet uses the service that bridges between lightning liquid and on.
[01:40:18] Speaker A: Chain and they do both swaps. It's what we do with the bolt swaps.
[01:40:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like basically they're talking to somebody else who like takes a fee. And I thought it was like kind of like a marriage between like you as the LSP to. To. To somebody else as a service that's like bridging these things and doing stuff. Which I'm. And don't get me wrong, I really like bolts. But you know the fees add up. When you're talking to user. There's just. Sometimes there's a delay, you know, especially if you're going on chain.
[01:40:49] Speaker A: No, Spark is a real layer two and look, it's a new layer of implementation.
[01:40:56] Speaker B: And I did not realize it was.
It was sovereign and self custodial. I didn't realize it had the ARC type aspect. I thought it was more of a like semi trusted setup. Especially. Especially with offline being paid. Possible.
[01:41:11] Speaker A: Yeah. The only thing that he doesn't have that arc has, it's like deterministic settlement. Meaning when an arc round is taking place then you have assurance that you are settled on chain.
Yeah.
[01:41:31] Speaker B: Because of the connector covenant element of it. Yeah.
[01:41:35] Speaker A: There's an actual round. There's an actual.
There's a. There's an actual on chain transaction that you are part of as your tree of transaction.
[01:41:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:41:46] Speaker A: Yes. And with the spark you don't have that. You have a way to always unitarily exit but you don't know that you're settled. Like I don't know what it means because you can settle and you can spend the funds, but you don't have kind of the on chain assurance of settlement at any given time. You don't have that in ARC as well with the out of round payments. So you, you have that only after around. That's another. Yeah, another issue.
[01:42:17] Speaker B: So for the audience just to kind of pull back on. Like what I know about state chains and stuff is that you kind of have this proof that you can take it to the chain. Kind of like a lightning channel. Right. But you have to compete in order. You potentially have to compete. Right. Is there's. There's a time delay and then there's a. There's like a proof.
[01:42:40] Speaker A: You're talking about the unilateral exit.
[01:42:42] Speaker B: Yes, the unilateral exit. Yes, yes.
[01:42:44] Speaker A: It's exactly like closing a channel in lightning.
[01:42:46] Speaker B: Exactly like closing a channel.
[01:42:48] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly like closing channel. So we, you have, you have a time block. Basically every time you pay someone, this someone the unit will exit transaction has a lower time lock than the sender. So.
[01:43:06] Speaker B: Yes.
Yeah. You'll get in first if you pay the right fee. And you know then. So it's unilateral if you broadcasted your.
[01:43:14] Speaker A: Transaction, you should get before the. Exactly like closing a channel. When someone closes a force closes a channel, they close the previous state of the channel. They can steal your funds. Unless you broadcast a justice transaction.
[01:43:31] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly.
[01:43:33] Speaker A: And that's the same case with a unitary exit on state chains.
[01:43:38] Speaker B: Yes. And. But it's a little bit different with ARK because this is the same condition basically in an interim payment like while payments are happening in between settlements. But then every time they do they do a round periodically they do it around your. Stamp it.
[01:43:57] Speaker A: Exactly.
[01:43:57] Speaker B: They. They stamp it. And then basically there is one UTXO where all the users have their branch and their sub owned UTXO of whatever their amount is. And like that's done. Nobody else can take it. Nobody can. If it takes you too long to go to chain, it doesn't really matter like that one.
[01:44:15] Speaker A: But that's a temporary state.
[01:44:18] Speaker B: But it's temporary. As soon as you receive another transaction, it's all. It's back up.
[01:44:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Most of the ARC activity will take place out of rounds.
[01:44:26] Speaker B: Yeah. Overwhelming majority will take out of rounds. Yeah.
[01:44:29] Speaker A: So in between rounds you have the same. Basically the same trust profile.
[01:44:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah.
So. But again that's. It's all fascinating, you know. It's like I'm totally happy to have a significant amount of money in lightning channels now because it's ready to go. It's fast and it gives me that unilateral exit and I'm, I'm seriously, I'm so happy to find out that it stay chains because I really didn't know it was state chains.
[01:44:54] Speaker A: It's a station that works like it's better than.
[01:44:56] Speaker B: It's a state chain that works. It's a state shade that works. And I obviously it's because I have a technical understanding of state chains. I. I did kind of a deep dive two years ago or whatever it was and I thought it was a fascinating idea.
[01:45:11] Speaker A: Shout out to Ruben.
[01:45:13] Speaker B: Yeah, shout outs. Shout out to Reuben, man.
But I'll tell you, one of the big things to me was that like you actually had to generate all of the sub coins. You. You had to break down the entire tree. I was like oof. Like I mean sure, computers are great and you know we can do that but like how big does that, how big does that tree get?
[01:45:33] Speaker A: If yeah, if I go to a merchant, if I can pay for coffee unless I have the exact change, the system doesn't work. Right.
[01:45:43] Speaker B: Yeah that's the thing is that if you have to break it down to where you can always have exact change, how big does the space of those coins get? You know, that's the different, the different bills. That, that was always. My thing is like. Like this is a brilliant idea. I love this. But how the hell do you do that with 2000 bitcoin or something?
[01:46:05] Speaker A: You know by the way, Spark is very sophisticated in that regard that it allows you to predefine your.
Although they can always split on demand.
You can also define your strategy, your kind of tree strategy on how you want to be optimized for payments for unitarial exit and works really well. Yep.
[01:46:36] Speaker B: So you basically have UTXO management off chain.
That's awesome.
That's awesome.
How does.
How does offline work with statechains? How do you. How do you receive payments in that and specifically how do you do it with lightning. So let's say you're using state chains and I'm normal on nostr. I'm using the Primal Wallet. Right. And I want to pay your Noster key. How andor is that easily doable that I could send you 21 stats on Spark?
[01:47:10] Speaker A: Well through the pre SDK you can do that very easy.
[01:47:15] Speaker B: Hell yes.
You make me happy, Roy.
You make me happy, Roy. I appreciate the work because it's super easy.
[01:47:24] Speaker A: Like Spark has a built in bolt 11 support but we part of the bridge SDK we add all the fully featured Lightning artifacts where you can do ln URL and you get Lightning address out of the box and you can set the Lightning address to your own domain just with a simple configuration.
So you have all you need in order to build a fully featured Lightning applications. Soon it will have Noster Wallet connect. So it's really kind of one stop shelf for all your Lightning Noster payment needs focused on payments. I won't do social and I won't do kind of generic stuff but yeah, whatever.
[01:48:09] Speaker B: Payments is all I'm concerned about.
[01:48:10] Speaker A: Value transfer stuff. Like it's all we give you one stop shop to do whatever you want.
We're also having a new feature plan that I haven't discussed it publicly, but why not? Let's do it now. We will have a stable balance.
We'll have a stable balance feature where you can kind of fix your balance to a stable coin but pay with that balance to Lightning and receive payments in Lightning. That's another feature that we're going to build into the SDK. So people complaining about volatility and stuff like that.
Okay, like, and it's not, it's, it's not, it's not a custodial solution like stable sets that the Blinkfold Fox has developed. It's a fully non custodial solution.
So a lot of cool stuff are coming and I suggest people to kind of keep like keep their finger on the pulse because things are changing rapidly and every release we're releasing a new thing and it's cooler than the, the previous thing. We are talking about seedless restore.
It's going to come in one of our next iteration. A lot of stuff are coming. It's mind blowing how the technology has improved and it's all because we have a Spark and other technologies that are kind of really taking the user experience to the next level.
[01:49:44] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:49:45] Speaker A: I just wanted to answer your actual question about Lightning. Spark is part of the Spark entity. There's an entity called an ssp. Spark Service Provider.
[01:49:54] Speaker B: Service Provider, yeah.
[01:49:56] Speaker A: That functions like an lsp. So when you want to receive a payment you as a user you basically share your pre image with the Spark operators and the pre image is sharded across the operator. So a single operator does have your full free image so it can collude with the ssp.
So think about your free image splitted into multiple parts. These parts are being shared with the Spark operator. When you receive a payment through the ssp, the SSP talks to the Spark entity that talks to the Spark operator in order to consolidate the free image into a single free image in order to settle the payment. So it's settled offline. The. The SSP received receive the funds.
And, and, and, and, and you have the funds because you're working with the Spark operators to claim your funds when you go back online.
And it's. Everything is completely trustless.
[01:51:02] Speaker B: That's amazing.
And a qu. Another question is. So you share a pre image. Is this. Is this something that can be derived to additional pre images, or can that pre image be used over again? Like, let's say. Let's say I go offline and then like, something gets like super popular in the next two hours before I come back online and I receive a hundred thousand payments. Is that doable?
[01:51:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it scales. It scales really, really well.
Yeah.
[01:51:28] Speaker B: That's awesome.
[01:51:30] Speaker A: Yeah. One of the things that Spark has is they. They also have a stable token platform. So people are issuing meme coins on. On. On Spark.
And, and why not?
[01:51:43] Speaker B: That's the place you do it. Quit doing it on chain. Do it on Spark.
[01:51:46] Speaker A: Exactly. But it's also a good stress test.
[01:51:49] Speaker B: For the entire sell your dick butts on Stark.
[01:51:54] Speaker A: It's a great stress test mechanism because.
Because you get this. They got kind of millions of transactions because of these stupid meme coins, and it broke. It broke Spark. So they had to kind of scale and they scaled.
[01:52:12] Speaker B: That's great.
[01:52:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:52:13] Speaker B: I love, I love it when something.
Something breaks and they figure out like, oh, shit, this didn't scale to this, and then fix it. Um, and, you know, it's funny, I, you know, of all the, like, meme coins and, you know, all this, even stable coins or whatever, like some of the things that people like, detract from that. There's two things that, especially with the way we're thinking and we're building, absolutely had to be provided or, or like an option is. I think people forget that like a meme coin or a token or whatever is also a gift card. Like, that's what a gift card is.
[01:52:50] Speaker A: That's exactly a gift card.
[01:52:52] Speaker B: I want to be able to sell gift cards to be able to receive something that you can only use in a certain context.
[01:53:00] Speaker A: We haven't talked about Cashew and E Cash tokens, but.
[01:53:04] Speaker B: Oh, we will go to that in just a second. I want to hold that thought. Hold that thought. Hold it. Because I definitely want to go there.
But the, the other thing I was thinking about is that, like, a bunch of people like Stablecoin, like, they're all poo poo on stablecoins. And I'm like, people need to be able to like there could not be a better way to bridge the gap than letting people use a currency they know they are, they are comfortable with, that things are priced, that their life is priced in on the rails of the better technology, on the rails of the better money.
So that their interaction with the old is exactly like the interaction with the one that's going to replace it.
[01:53:48] Speaker A: Unless it affects the user experience of the, of Bitcoin.
[01:53:52] Speaker B: Oh sure. Oh sure, sure sure, sure. Like that caveat definitely needs to be there. But I mean it in the context of like, like I want to support like stablecoins are a huge market USDT or whatever is massive. It's, it's the only quote unquote crypto that has a use case a success around the world and it's also the only other one. That's a fact. That's a simple fact.
[01:54:17] Speaker A: The market has spoken. Stable coins are processing, I don't know, 1 trillion to $2 trillion a month in terms of volume. Like whoa, is it that big?
[01:54:27] Speaker B: Good God. I didn't realize it was that much.
[01:54:30] Speaker A: Yeah, trillion.
It's in the trillions.
[01:54:32] Speaker B: Now that's crazy.
But, but like for like paradrive and stuff like obviously I want people to be able to use Bitcoin but obviously stable coins as well because this is, this is something that people in, you know, potentially any country or across any completely unbanked can receive in their scope of what's valuable or what a good currency is. That their currencies lost 80% this year.
The dollar is magic to them. You know, like they, they and then to be able to have that without needing to be able to connect to a US bank or to, to have you know, cross, cross border payments without any of the cross border headache and KYC quote unquote on the back end. Like, like not KYC front. Like that's, that's how I think about like stablecoins and like centralized fiat tokens. Like that is that you can just create an account and receive the payment and like all that stuff. But there may be censorship on the back end if there is apparent indication of like oh you're a drug lord or something and police and you know that stuff get involved. But it's fundamentally different from like I have to fill out this form, I have to tell you what I'm going to use it for. I have to you know, scan, scan my give you a DNA scan and a, and a sperm sample and two copies of my ID just to get a bank account.
[01:55:59] Speaker A: It's not just that the market has spoken and retail users have spoken, it's just that also fintech companies are moving to stablecoins and Stripe is doing strategic acquisitions and PayPal and the traditional fintech vendor is moving to stablecoin. Rails like it's not.
There's no question about the need of SAOIN and, and on the fact that SAO improved the the previous traditional Rails like that's a, that's a no brainer. The question is if stable coins can compete with Bitcoin when it comes to value transfer, meaning is it possible to do kind of the value transfer use cases that I'm talking about.
Would it be possible to, to. To implement them on top of stable coins or Bitcoin is the only solution? Because I think because stablecoin is a representation of fiat and because stable coins are essentially run by centralized companies, these are going to get regulated as well and then you'll have friction on the stablecoin level. You already have that in some cases somewhat, but it's gonna get worse over time. And then the only competition and the only coin that can bring the permissionless, open monetary, neutral, decentralized value proposition is Bitcoin. But it doesn't mean, by the way, that you won't be able to convert to stablecoin on the edge, meaning the stable balance feature that I was mentioning before, we will give you as part of the resource decay, we'll give you a way to transfer, send and receive Bitcoin. But once the bitcoins are in your balance, they will be automatically converted to a stable coin in order to avoid volatility.
[01:58:05] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.
[01:58:07] Speaker A: Why do you need more than that?
[01:58:09] Speaker B: Like yeah, yeah, let's go back to the cashy thing. Yeah, tell me about cashy. How does this integrate with like let's say again, Nostra being the example. Somebody wants to send me e cash.
How many different conversions? That's like one of the only things too is that like you know, somebody can send ecash directly to your public key on nostr and then like that can literally only be unlocked that way. But when I have like a lightning address it's like okay, how many, how many bridges and conversions and stuff are in the mix to get that from A to B?
[01:58:44] Speaker A: It depends on the token implementation. So we have now we ran a challenge called Time to build where we had the price pool for developers to implement stuff on top of the bridges SDK and a few implementation. I think three implementation implementations were to use the breeze decay as the backend for minting ecash tokens.
Okay, so you can mint on top of whatever.
Let's say we give you a bridus decay with spark. You can mint on top of spark and you're done. Basically.
[01:59:27] Speaker B: That would basically be ecash with proof of reserves.
[01:59:30] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is.
[01:59:32] Speaker B: Wait, so you can do e cash with unilateral exit and proof of reserves.
How does that work?
[01:59:40] Speaker A: Still custodial.
[01:59:41] Speaker B: You need to trust the mint. It's still custodial.
[01:59:43] Speaker A: Okay, okay, yes, yes. Yeah, it's still custodial, but in the backend, it's not minted out of thin air. It's minted on top of a spark address that everyone can audit.
[01:59:56] Speaker B: That's amazing because I thought I talked about this randomly as like a tangent in one of the speeches I gave. I think it was like bitblock boom last year or something, because I was like, I couldn't believe.
I was surprised that no ecash mint had done a.
Basically a hash table of like, all of like.
[02:00:20] Speaker A: Yeah, proof of reserve. You want the proof of reserve?
[02:00:23] Speaker B: A proof of reserve that I. I put one bitcoin into this utxo and I came and time lock it for six months and just be like, every six months I'm going to refresh this and you know, your, your proof of like, these are real e cash. Real bitcoin, e cash. It exists for this that expires in six months. And then I'll refresh it and you'll get a new one.
But that, that rather than just like me minting ecash and giving it to you and you wondering if the bitcoin's there. Is that in the root or in the op return or whatever? I have a hash of the entire tree of the ecash that's there. And you can prove that you're just a part of that. And it can and it relates to that one bitcoin and that's. That's it. And obviously still custodial. Obviously I could still not give it back to you, but, you know, I didn't inflate it. You know, I'm not rehypothecating. That's not possible because you. You have the hash connecting exactly to that one bitcoin. And I was like, why has like, that's such a huge, like a vast step up on understanding what it is that you're getting and exactly what you're trusting.
And I couldn't believe nobody had done that.
[02:01:34] Speaker A: But you couldn't do that on lightning because how can you provide that rule reserve from your lightning node?
[02:01:41] Speaker B: Very true.
[02:01:42] Speaker A: But now we can do that.
[02:01:43] Speaker B: But you can on stage. And now you can do that. Now you can do that.
Man, that's awesome.
[02:01:49] Speaker A: And it's coming. So. So it can be kind of the basis of.
The only question that remains open with with Ecash is who will run the beans. But.
But I think it was Max Webster that told me, well, we're getting closer to the data AI will run me.
I think it's an exciting area to search and explore as well.
And Ecache essentially is another sub network of Lightning because basically what's the interface of Ecash?
Lightning as well.
[02:02:37] Speaker B: Yep, it's lightning. It's all lightning. It's all lightning.
[02:02:42] Speaker A: It's also the common language when it comes to ecash. So the protocol.
[02:02:47] Speaker B: And again, it's the only reason ecache works. Yes, because lightning.
[02:02:51] Speaker A: Exactly. So it has. It already speaks lightning.
[02:02:54] Speaker B: So.
[02:02:54] Speaker A: So now it will use lightning to mint. Then we gone full circle. Yes. But it will give you a better privacy, for example, that you don't get inspired right now. And it will give you an ability to give physically. To physically give the artifact to someone else that you can do that with Ecash. So there's a lot of advantages of ecache in that regard. But the design spaces is crazy.
So.
And not to mention I haven't even spoken about the thing that you can do with offline scripting with arc, the stuff that the arc, the arcade script that the ARC Labs guys are working on.
That's also crazy times. I know it seems like from people. I think people kind of are tired for. Of following the advance the technology advances.
[02:03:47] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:03:48] Speaker A: I get a lot of people kind of when they talk to me, they talk to me about the payment channels or the bruise wallet or like stuff that are really kind of are honestly boring to me. Like we. We're so far beyond that in terms of usage, in terms of. In terms of technology, in terms of product market feed, in terms of goto, like in a different place.
So I know there was a lot of excitement around Lightning. The core running an umbrel, running a node payment channels. But there's so many things that are being released and so keep up with the technology.
There's a clock by Alten Labs that is another very fascinating protocol.
The design space is just getting crazier and fascinating and the solutions that are being built are far more robust and scalable.
[02:04:48] Speaker B: So.
[02:04:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:04:50] Speaker B: And importantly, it seems like they were finally, especially with this sub network of lightning model, whether it be ecash, statechains, arc, whatever is.
We're finally getting to, to the UX layer. Like, like we're looking at layers three and four kind of in the stack of like where, where things are operating, but we're finally getting to the one that makes sense from the user's perspective.
[02:05:17] Speaker A: Exactly. Is it.
[02:05:18] Speaker B: There's no upfront, there's. It's just.
[02:05:21] Speaker A: You can focus on just building your service or application, your tool. You don't need to think about lighting at all.
[02:05:29] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
And that's awesome that. That's like a super critical thing. And you know, I want to. I think we brought this up before, before the show, so.
But I can't remember exactly. But you had mentioned that.
Yeah, it was because I, I just generally asked about the price and you had said that the.
You thought it had stopped.
We could not predict or really see much about it in relation to the users and like how much it's being used and that it got boring. Is that you think people are. And I, I, this, this really hit me because I, I'm like, no, I totally feel that too. Is that nobody really cares to talk about bitcoin. It's. It's not, it's not the cool thing to talk about anymore. It's not edgy. It's just like, oh, yes, it's bitcoin.
[02:06:24] Speaker A: You don't have enough memes that the culture is not interesting and. Yes, yes, definitely, but boring is part of being mainstream. Right?
[02:06:35] Speaker B: Boring is part of being mainstream. How do you think about that in the context of bitcoin's adoption? Because I feel like being edgy and interesting and different is kind of a big part of bitcoin's I guess, narrative success.
[02:06:50] Speaker A: Yeah, we lost it.
[02:06:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we lost and we lost that.
[02:06:54] Speaker A: We lost it. There are several reasons that, like, I didn't do such a sociological analysis of why we lost it, but we lost it because we lost the developers. Basically. Developers are moved very quickly from Bitcoin to Ethereum.
And we also, in the past year we.
We've been sold out to the Wall street guys with ETFs and kind of the, the administration.
So we don't have kind of the cypherpunk. We lost a lot of the cypherpunk culture. So you don't have a cool dev community. You don't have a cool cypherpunk community.
The culture is very hard.
And you see people are struggling.
[02:07:47] Speaker B: There's a lot of dilution.
[02:07:49] Speaker A: People are struggling to voice themselves inside the bitcoin ecosystem, you need to have a certain type in order to be heard.
Very alpha, very technical as well. Like you can be non technical and contribute.
So we, the culture is hard. So we're losing people like smart, intelligent, cool people to other ecosystems and the people that. I don't know if I haven't seen you in any conference last year, but I'm doing kind of the conference circus of Bitcoin. It's the same people basically.
Almost no newcomers, same faces, same discussions even.
So on the one hand, I think maybe we don't need community support or ecosystem support because we kind of cross the chasm and we have enough people to, to bring this technology to mainstream. Like the people that are already in bitcoin are enough then the energy that we harnessed and the force that we have is enough to bring bitcoin to mainstream.
That's one option. And the other option is to make bitcoin cool again by actually using Bitcoin. And that's basically what I'm trying to do. I'm trying kind of to simplify the developer experience to bring more people building cool stuff on Bitcoin and to develop a community that will take it to the next level.
And, and, and, and hopefully won't talk only about opcodes, but also talk about solutions, buildings, AI integrations and kind of make bitcoin exciting again.
In that regard, Bitcoin needs to be exciting because it provides a utility that no other technology provides. The value transfer technology and the value transfer technology needs to be embedded in every application in the world, period. That's super exciting.
But there's a lot of education to do in order to.
Education.
I'm not talking about orange building, I'm talking about kind of, it's very early and we need kind of market education in terms of the tool you, if you.
For peer drive, if you don't use something like the Brizz Decay in order to integrate payments, like who will?
Yeah. So.
[02:10:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[02:10:40] Speaker A: But I think every app developer in the world should use Bitcoin and should embed bitcoin payments in their applications. So I think we're going to make bitcoin exciting again.
But we're definitely in a, in a very weird, boring state, I would say.
[02:10:59] Speaker B: I think we're in the, we're in the doldrums. Right? Is that we're waiting for. Because we, and I read this on the show maybe like two years ago, three years ago now, but the. It was like the end of orange pilling and, and I think it Was. It was well aware that like we were on that trend then. I think this, where we are now is kind of like.
[02:11:25] Speaker A: That's my article, Guy Orange Peeling.
[02:11:27] Speaker B: Wait, was that your article?
[02:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:11:29] Speaker B: Is that your article? Oh my God. Because there's. I know there was one with Hector that was talking about orange pilling too.
So I knew it was one of. One of those. But I love that that one's yours. But the end of orange filling. And then there was a.
So, so we have like the orange pilling argument of like, okay, this is. We've saturated everybody who. That's your article that cracks me up. We've saturated everybody who cares about that. You can explain the monetary economics and they'll be like super into it.
[02:11:59] Speaker A: They're.
[02:11:59] Speaker B: Yeah, like the ideologically aligned to it. We've hit that audience then from a technical perspective, everybody who wants to see new cool stuff being built or whatever, it's like, yeah, all that stuff is great. But we had found those people and saturated those narratives and those environments and I think the only way out, the only way to break into the next era is prove those things.
[02:12:28] Speaker A: Exactly.
[02:12:28] Speaker B: Is. Is prove those things in action is like give it to people.
[02:12:32] Speaker A: Exactly. Manifest. I call it manifesting the bitcoin. The bitcoin utility. And, and, and. And the problem with the bitcoin ecosystem right now is that we're keep using the same techniques that we use early on in order to educate new people.
[02:12:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And. And that's not it.
[02:12:51] Speaker A: And you see that. You see every time I've like the. I. There's no. There, there used to. When I went to a conference, it used to be like an explosion of energy. It was like you can feel the electricity in the air. Every time you went early in the early days of bitcoin, of bitcoin development.
[02:13:12] Speaker B: Now, now it's kind of like old friends getting together. Yes.
[02:13:15] Speaker A: Like that's the only reason, only reason, like to. To maintain existing relationships. That's the only reason to go to conference. And we lost that excitement.
[02:13:27] Speaker B: Yeah. But I think we can get it back. Yes, I think we are going to get it back in a whole different way.
[02:13:31] Speaker A: It's a good. I'm not saying it is a bad thing. I think it's a phase. It's the phase it was supposed to happen because you grow up and you're not as cool as you used to be. But then.
Yeah, yeah. But then you bring cool kids to the world, right?
[02:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:13:49] Speaker A: And they are the actual cool thing that, that you do. So we need to that's kind of. We need to bear children, basically. That's what we need to do now.
[02:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Love it, Love it. Um, I have already kept you for two hours and 15 minutes. This might be a good place to end, actually. Was there any other man I could really go? Because you, you had brought something up just a minute ago that I was like, man, that's another 40 minute conversation. Um, uh, I don't even know if I should remember what it was so that we don't, we don't accidentally get into it.
But was there anything else, any other major thing? Because I'm, I'm going to be looking at this far more seriously now. Oh. Oh. I do have a question actually. Like, so one of the things about ARC is that I had considered that obviously we could just implement something else, but down the road I would like to actually be a participant in this and maybe even be an ARC service provider.
And in the same context with state chains, is Spark totally open source and something where there's a, there's a daemon or daemon that can be run and like you can be a Spark service provider.
But I know Spark is like the company also.
So like how, how does that relationship work out between their code?
[02:15:03] Speaker A: The company is LightSpark. The project is LightSpark.
[02:15:06] Speaker B: LightSpark.
[02:15:07] Speaker A: Okay.
[02:15:08] Speaker B: Okay.
[02:15:08] Speaker A: And LightSpark is running a Spark entity that is comprised of various Spark operators and an ssp. And they run the ssp.
It's on the roadmap to open up the ssp so you'll be able to function as an ssp. Currently everything is open source, so theoretically you can run your own Spark, but the SSP component isn't open source. The SSP component isn't open source. The interface is known. So you can, you can build your own ssp. But they didn't open source their own SSP implementation and that's because they're using proprietary LightSpark implementation in the, in their SSP.
Gotcha.
[02:15:51] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[02:15:52] Speaker A: But it's not. It's not. We took a look at the SSP interface, but it's a simple interface, relatively simple interface to, to build, you just need to know how to operate a node in order to facilitate the, the payments. But from any, from an implementation standpoint, there's not a lot of work. So you can run your own Spark, you'll be able to function as an SSP in the existing Spark entity in the future.
And it's open source, so you can do whatever you want.
[02:16:27] Speaker B: Sweet. Sweet.
And how's the fee model in it? Out of curiosity.
[02:16:32] Speaker A: Fee model is for Lightning.
So currently the in Spark payments are free. But they will introduce some kind of fee model later on.
Will be cheaper than lightning because you don't have any liquidity constraints.
For Lightning. They take a 0.2 to receive, 0.25 to send.
Sweet.
Yeah, sweet.
[02:17:04] Speaker B: You know I kind of. I've. I've felt like for a while that it almost makes sense. It might be a little bit different with arc just because you're constantly going to chain to settle, you know, you have the rounds.
But I've always thought that like it. There might be a full model that's just the lightning bridge fee, you know, just the.02% in and 0.25% out for lightning and everything inside of the Spark or whatever is free just because again it's not really use. There's so much you can't do without Lightning, you know, like. And, and that's.
[02:17:38] Speaker A: That's currently the fee model. That's. That's exactly the.
[02:17:42] Speaker B: I wonder if that's actually sustainable in the wrong long run even with like a lightning.
[02:17:46] Speaker A: I don't think so.
[02:17:47] Speaker B: Be curious. You don't think so?
[02:17:49] Speaker A: No, I think. I think they. I think they will monetize the inspired operations as well. Just because the primary use case isn't bitcoin, the primary use is stablecoin.
[02:18:01] Speaker B: That's a good point.
[02:18:03] Speaker A: If someone else is minting the Stable coin but is using Spark as rail, they need to monetize.
[02:18:11] Speaker B: Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're. You're perfect. You're right.
[02:18:14] Speaker A: That's right. That's one model. Another model that they will allow but it's open so it's not. It's. Everyone can mint on Spark. Another option is to kind of gatekeep the minting and to. And to allow minting of stablecoins or tokens that they can do rev share with the issuer. That's another model that you can put in place. But I don't think they'll go to that model. I think they will keep Spark permissionless for issuing tokens as well and they will take a small fee for.
For making the. The.
The transactions. Why not?
[02:18:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that makes more sense than the, the revenue share model. Just because like it doesn't really matter. You're. You're agnostic. You want to be extremely simple metric. So like, like literally it's just, it's just your transaction load. Like, like it's like bandwidth. Right? Is that you don't have to think about why or what bandwidth is happening. It just is.
[02:19:14] Speaker A: You know, also the regulatory.
The regulatory issue that you mentioned before, that's. That's very important. Like if the. It's an infrastructure, they. It needs to be neutral.
They can't. They can't hide behind the neutrality. If the regulator will come to them and say, well, but you allow only specific.
[02:19:38] Speaker B: Yeah.
[02:19:40] Speaker A: Issuers to mint tokens. Yeah. So I think it's more natural from an infrastructure standpoint.
[02:19:47] Speaker B: Gotcha.
Well, man, is there anything else you want to mention here at the end, maybe about Breeze article? I think there's an article that I haven't read recently.
[02:19:58] Speaker A: The last article I released was on Stable coins.
Why stablecoins is only an evolution but not a revolution.
[02:20:10] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, no, I haven't read that one yet. I need to put that one in the evolution, not revolution.
I don't think I did.
I did read it, but I don't think I have it on the show.
Did you see me. Did you see me post it on the show?
I don't know anymore.
Too much shit.
I'll check.
[02:20:31] Speaker A: It's relatively new. Like, I don't think you even had time. It's December, so I released it at the end of December. So it's very, I think the. A day before Christmas or something like that. So. So it's new.
And.
And I'm gonna release a very. You remember the abacus exam analogy that I did for Lightning? Like where we had.
[02:20:53] Speaker B: Oh yeah, I love that analogy.
[02:20:55] Speaker A: So I'm gonna do something similar for Spark just to explain how awesome things are working behind the scenes.
Breeze is there. Like, I recommend everyone. Everyone. I mean everyone. Not just developers. Everyone Today everyone is a developer. Like, we've discussed the beginning of the show.
Use the. Use the Bruise SDK. Build value transfer experiences into your apps and services and it's only going to get better. And we're gonna bring C Restore. We're gonna bring a stable balance.
It's. The present is. Is bright, but the future gonna be brighter. Like it's really.
It's really coming. Everything is coming together.
[02:21:44] Speaker B: Sweet.
That's awesome.
I can't believe I didn't. I wasn't aware of these updates and I tried to keep up with yay time what you're building. I try to keep up with Breeze really well and I just.
I just can't. I don't believe it. Can't believe I didn't realize it was state chains. Because I have been waiting for new news on state chains. It's one of those things that I was like, Mercury was cool.
I used Mercury and I was like, this is such.
This is a solution. This is an arc. You know, I think it's a good.
[02:22:13] Speaker A: Thing that you didn't know that Spark is a state chain because we stopped talking about technology and started talking about the service.
Exactly.
[02:22:22] Speaker B: Or the user experience. What you can do.
[02:22:24] Speaker A: That's another revolution in. But for people that have been in Bitcoin since the get go, they're used.
[02:22:32] Speaker B: To a specific discourse.
[02:22:36] Speaker A: So I find it. I experienced that a lot with people that kind of lost touch with the new updates. Also when it comes to Arkansas, like people can tell you, okay, there's an arc thing, but they don't know how it works exactly. People know that there's a Alpen Labs and there's a Glock, but they don't know how it works exactly. People know about Spark, but they don't know how it works exactly.
So.
Yep. I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but it is what it is. We'll try to do our best in order to educate the market and be completely transparent about what we, we do, where we headed.
But I'm, I'm, I'm happy to see all the projects that are being built on top of the bruise SDK. We have over 50 implementations right now. Let's. Let's hope that in end of 2026 we'll have 500 and then 5,000.
[02:23:32] Speaker B: Let's go for a thousand.
I think we'd go for a thousand in 2026. Let's push.
[02:23:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:23:37] Speaker B: I want to help. I want to help.
[02:23:39] Speaker A: Let's do it.
[02:23:41] Speaker B: But that's. I'm, I'm, I'm excited too. Just because, like, I feel like, like that's the way to bring the energy back. I mean it just, it just is. This was, this was always the only way to, to get to that next step.
[02:23:55] Speaker A: Yeah.
[02:23:55] Speaker B: Is to prove it is to manifest. And then that is this era. And I also think that's the move. Like there's only so much.
There's only so much growth or so much adoption, so to speak, that you can get if you're having to convince, if you're having somebody to have to believe in adoption, you know.
[02:24:19] Speaker A: Yeah. If something requires education.
It doesn't scale.
[02:24:24] Speaker B: It doesn't scale. It doesn't scale. It's already, it already has a hard limit.
[02:24:29] Speaker A: Yes.
[02:24:29] Speaker B: And exactly.
Nobody knows how to use the Internet. Like, nobody knows. Nobody knows how that shit works.
[02:24:35] Speaker A: Yep. No one knows how VPN works, but everyone uses a vpn. Yeah.
[02:24:41] Speaker B: Yeah. So that's where we are. So build, Build the vpn. Build the Internet, build the car, you.
[02:24:48] Speaker A: Know, build the Uber, build the only fans, build the Spotify, build the paradrive, Build, build, build, build solutions that solves real issues. But know that now as part of your toolkit, you have a way to transfer value, which you didn't have using fintech, stablecoins or whatever.
[02:25:10] Speaker B: Man, I really hope we get to be about, like, what we're building, gets to be a part of this. I really hope that it makes a difference and it does something really cool.
[02:25:18] Speaker A: It's not a question of if, guys. When, it's when.
[02:25:22] Speaker B: It's when. Yeah, that's. I mean, I'm just going to keep trying to make it. I'm building something for me too at the same time, you know, like that's, that's the only reason I'm really building it. So I don't have any reason to stop. I'll just make it better if it's. If it's not good enough.
[02:25:36] Speaker A: That's the infinite game you're playing.
[02:25:38] Speaker B: Hell yeah. Hell yeah, dude. Thank you, Roy. Always great to catch up.
Fantastic show.
[02:25:45] Speaker A: Let's not wait for another three years to catch up.
[02:25:48] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll read, I'll read your piece. I'll have that one. I love the evolution, not revolution, because that was again, one of those things where I think you always hit the nail on the head and you have such a great framing of it, articulating where we are and what piece goes where. So that'll be on the show soon. I'll. I'll send you a link.
[02:26:09] Speaker A: Cool.
Talk to you later, guy. Thank you for having me.
[02:26:13] Speaker B: Yeah, man, absolutely.
All right, guys, I hope you enjoyed that.
There is a lot to dig into, a lot of stuff that I'm going to be checking out and my experience with it, I will get to confirm, deny, just tell you how it is that I have gone about doing things. Hopefully we'll be doing it relatively soon. We've been having some other side issues that are kind of unrelated to all of it, getting communications. Hope to be back up and running with everybody here towards the end of this week. And we might actually go hard into this and just kind of run with the excitement about the new Breeze SDK and Spark and the fact that there's a statechain implementation that solves big hurdles of the previous statechain implementations.
And in doing so, I should have something to report and hopefully something to show you. This is how you can Implement code that you could give to opus your Claude and make use of. I hope to be a benefit on all of that front and then maybe some feedback for Roy and the Spark team and that sort of thing.
Just to reiterate, this is the time to build.
This is the time to walk the walk because we have the tools now. Even if this isn't perfect. I think we have reached the era where it can be made that way. We just have to work out the kinks, dot the I's and cross the T's and realize exactly how to implement these things for the user and where the best role is for us as node runners and infrastructure providers and people who have been here long enough that we know the nuances of building and working with this tech to cover those gaps for the user and give them an experience where they don't have to know, they don't have to think about what the word state chain is because that's not relevant. Or what an ark or a covenant or a connector or utxo. They just need to know that they can receive payment, they can send payment and they can do so cheaply, easily and quickly and in a way that just feels like the future from having to deal with the horrific situation of banking and finance and this old world that just creates so much friction and so much headache and so much red tape that it's almost not worth the experience in so many different environments. And so that's our job. If you've got an idea and you want to build something, sit down with AI and build something.
Hopefully I can help provide some of those tools as well and you can build it peer to peer on top of Bear Drive. So with that I have to get back to work and I'll keep you updated here on Bitcoin Audible we will read the best, talk to the best and build the best.
Thank you for listening.
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[02:31:11] Speaker A: La.