Embassy: Sovereign Personal Computing, Privacy, Bitcoin & Lightning

Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast. For episode two hundred and twenty-five today, we're talking about sovereign personal computing, privacy, Bitcoin and Lightning with Matt Hill and Aidan McClelland of Start Nine Labs, and we're talking about Embassy and Embassy OS. This show brought to you by Swan Bitcoin in their effort to spread Bitcoin knowledge and awareness. Swan is giving away a free book, Inventing Bitcoin, rated four point nine stars by Swan co-founder Jan Pritzker, to get your free e-book or audiobook version of Inventing Bitcoin, go to swanbitcoin dot com slash free book. All Swan asks is that you pay it forward, share the book with at least three family and friends, and if you join the Swan Force at swanbitcoin dot com slash enlist, you'll get a special link to the free copy of Inventing Bitcoin that will help you recruit new bitcoiners. You can share the book with anyone, and if they eventually One, you'll get credit for that referral. Spread Bitcoin knowledge and Swan Bitcoin, the best and safest place to start accumulating Bitcoin, so head over to swanbitcoin dot com slash freebook now to claim your free copy of Inventing Bitcoin. So you might be familiar with Hoddle Hoddle, the peer-to-peer exchange. They have launched a new lending platform, global, non-custodial, anonymous, and using Bitcoin multisig. This is a fascinating new product allowing peer-to-peer lending and borrowing between users. But- Bitcoin is locked up in multisig escrow and the loan is funded using a stablecoin such as USDT, USDC, Pax or Dai. If you're a hodler who wants some liquidity without selling your Bitcoin, this is now another option to get fiat stablecoin liquidity. Or if you've got stablecoins and you want interest, this is Bitcoin DeFi. With HoddleHoddle's Lend platform, you set your own terms, put up offers depending on how long you want to borrow or lend and the interest rates. Go and take a look at lend.hoddlehoddle.com NOX is a Bitcoin custodian dedicated to ensuring their insurance protection covers the full value of their customers' assets. For example, suppose a fiduciary wants to hold two hundred and fifty million dollars of Bitcoin with NOX. NOX will seek to obtain two hundred and fifty million dollars of insurance dedicated exclusively to that account and adjustable to volatility, no fractional coverage or narrow scope, insurance for what it's worth, at all to transfer risk. If you are a Bitcoin company, investment fund, trust, or family office, check out NOX. For your insured custody, that website is knoxcustody dot com. Matt and Aidan, welcome to the show. Hey,

thanks for having us, Stephen.

So guys, I've been, following your work for a little while. I haven't, you know, gone really deep into it, like I haven't used it myself, but I'm interested to chat with you guys about it. but before we get started, let's hear a little bit about yourselves. How did you guys get into Bitcoin and what was your professional background before this?

alright, well, I'll start. so I definitely don't have a, you know, childhood or early childhood background in computers or computer programming. I grew up in a bakery. my father owned a wholesale and retail bagel bakery, so I grew up in there. that's really where I learned about, you know, entrepreneurship and providing products to customers and customer support, et cetera. after college, I took over the bakery. We grew that quite a bit, sold it. then I started a business with my brother in plastics recycling, which, you know, quite different than the baking industry. we had some success there. He, stuck with it, I moved on. he's now largest recycler of plastics goods in the Mid-Continent in the United States. so after that business, I kind of pivoted totally and, taught myself how to code and started building apps and, found myself over at Salt Lending back in late two- 2016. I was hired on there as their first engineering hire, tasked with, you know, building out the technology stack that Salt at the time was promising to the world and didn't have, as well as an engineering team, to help carry it out. So, you know, I, I started off at Salt, ended up hiring, Keegan Mclelland, one of the partners at Start9, who then brought in Aiden, who's on the call with us now, and Aaron Greenspan as well, who's part and even Lucy now, who's a developer for Startnine, were all hires, at, of mine at, Salt Lending, and, we eventually moved on from Salt. there was just nothing really left for us there, and, we took the- The talent and the team and, started up Start9, and that's what we're doing now.

Great. And Aidan, let's hear from you.

Yeah, I've, I've been writing code since probably about the third grade. started out doing, you know, simple basic programs on a my dad's TRS-80, computer. after that, moved on to doing some Java, some Minecraft mods, and then when I got into college, I- Went to, pursue a game development degree. after some time, I realized that the more in depth computer science theory stuff was just more in-interesting to me. I pivoted to computer science, and then once I finished my degree, I- Started doing malware analysis with, Norton, Symantec. After that, my brother, Keegan, he reached out to me saying he had this cool project he was working on in Colorado doing stuff with cryptocurrency, which I hadn't known much about at the time, And so I started to go down the rabbit hole, learned a whole lot about Bitcoin and Ethereum and everything there, and, came out to Colorado to work at, on the team at Salt Lending. And from there, I mean, you've heard the story from Matt, we moved on and we founded Startnine.

Awesome. So let's hear it from you then, Matt. What was it that made you start Start9?

So the team was the real driving force behind where we currently are, not the idea for Start9 itself. when I was at SALT- I was daily fascinated by the power and potential of the team that we had built there, and, I felt like we were being restrained by the sort of limited scope and old-school business model, to be honest, of, of salt lending, which is, you know, are you familiar with salt? Before we keep saying this, like, should we explain this? not

re- I've heard of it, but I haven't, I haven't looked into it too much myself.

All right, so salt's in the, in the vein of like a, BlockFi or, There's a couple others out there, but basically it's, they hold, in a very custodial way your crypto as collateral and provide fiat currency loans, and then you pay interest and make payments, and if you miss one, we have the collateral so we shave it off. And, and it was, it was a cool idea, I, I thought it was a cool business model, and there were definitely some challenges there on the technical side to solve to make that work, especially in highly volatile markets, being able to liquidate efficiently, you know, and effectively in The downturns, et cetera. And, so the team that we built there was, was extremely capable, and I, I was just blown away over and over again, especially by what is now the, the Start9 team in our ability to collaborate and solve problems, very, very efficiently. And, ultimately felt like we were being held back there, and it wasn't interesting enough, and it was also way too old school. It was, it was too custodial, it was too trusted, it's just not what's interesting about the space.

we're It's not that nothing else is interesting ever, it's just that, you know, we very much hold the tenets of, of decentralization and trustlessness, as core principles. And Salt wasn't doing that. So we, you know, we moved on, and, the hypothesis was that if I were to shove all these guys in a room together, with myself, and, and let time go by, that something incredible would come out. and I, you know, I've started quite a few businesses, and I know that that is a, So t- there's a time risk there for sure, it's not like we had any income or anything like that, we did some contracting work, but, you know, a couple ideas came and went. we were gonna do a Bitcoin derivatives exchange, in the vein of, Ledger X style, and once we saw the regulatory environment, just kind of laughed that off as like, "There's no way we're, we're, we're going down that route," "We'd have to all be lawyers rather than devs." and, and then one You know, I went to go set up my Lightning node, and, you know, Keegan had already had his running, and we were like, "Alright, let's, let's hook it up and, and do some payments." And I sat down to do it, and, you know Thirty minutes later, it was just like, "Oh, what the, you know? Like, come on. Like, I'm a, I'm a technical dude, I can definitely do this, " but it just seemed absurd to me how, how hard it was to get a lightning node up and running, and, you know, get the channel created and balanced and, and just the whole deal. And I was just like, you know, so I sat down and said, "How can we do this quickly? " And then Aidan and Keegan were, were like, all of a

Bitcoin related applications, and then things like Casa came into mind. I don't think like MyNode or any of them were around at the time, but Casa was really the, the forefront example in that space. so we started thinking in that direction, right? Thinking about not just a application or a service, but really a computing platform that could be used to run Bitcoin and Bitcoin, related services like Lightning. And, the more we thought in that direction, the more we realized that those weren't unique problems to Bitcoin, that they were actually problems to open source, self-hosted software in general. That many of the problems one faces when trying to run a Bitcoin node is the same problem that they would face when trying to, say, run, Matrix server or a Nextcloud server, basically any self-hosted open source sovereign computer software involved command lines And, you know, dependencies and configurations and stuff that nobody does. And we were like, "Can we solve this in a general way? Can we build a computing platform that is capable of running all self-hosted, open-source services for everyday people?" and that's, that's where we started going, and that's what we built.

Excellent. And so as I look into your website and look at what the project is looking to achieve, I see it as kind of Of like, it's, it's sort of like taking that idea of, you know, the typical node package softwares like Minnode and Raspiblitz and, you know, Nodal and things, but you're kind of expanding that out to actually doing some of these other aspects along with it. So as you mentioned, NexCloud, which is, for listeners who aren't aware, it's kind of like a- it's almost like having an office, but in the cloud, but on your own personal cloud sort of thing, and then Matrix, which is like your own, what's it, Riot Matrix? They came up with a new name.

Yeah, yeah. Or like, it's like a, like Telegram or, or things like that. it's your own self-hosted messaging platform.

Right. Yeah, it's an ambitious goal, certainly. but, I'm interested to kind of hear a little bit about that approach and, what you're using and, also, probably a good point to start talking about Embassy. So what is Embassy?

so Embassy is the name of our device. It is a personal computer, more specifically, a personal server, which is just a computer, it just sort of serves a different purpose. you know, it needs to have constant uptime, constant internet, connection. servers are designed to run in the background, right? They're not things that go in your pocket and are subject to, you know, airplane mode. they just run in the background so that you can always receive an email. Or a text message, even if you yourself are in the mountains or not online or whatever. so the Embassy is a personal server, and, Embassy OS is, you know, the real innovation. The Embassy personal server is commodity hardware. It's a Raspberry Pi, a micro SD card, a little speaker, you know, by design, actually, we wanted to keep the hardware extremely boring, and innovate on the software side. So while we sell a hardware device, we're actually a software company. and Embassy OS is our product. And, Embassy OS, is a true operating system, right? unlike, projects that we, support and, and like, such as MyNode or Raspiblitz, you know, Embassy OS is a, as an actual operating system as opposed to a, you know, basically a, a large bash script that, that pre-installs certain services, In, in the sense that, if you wanted to add a service, say, to my node, like a new Lightning service or BTC Pay or something like that, it would require a new OS, right? The entire OS has to be updated, so it's like a bundle deal. You sort of get all these services all for one, whether you like it or not, and if there's a problem with one of them, the entire OS needs to be updated. And that's, that's fine, it just doesn't scale. It's not a computing platform, it's like a prepackaged set of services. And, Embassy OS isn't that at all. Embassy OS is, is a true, self-hosted computing platform that is capable of running, all self-hosted open-source software, including managing dependencies, you know, advanced complex configurations. in fact, you know, I'd like to let Hayden talk about a lot of this because much of it was his design and his blood, sweat, and tears. I just kind of am the salesman. So why don't we let Aidan jump in here?

For sure. Yeah. So yeah, because, the, the interesting part with some of these operating systems is about how do you try to strip down or take out the unnecessary dependencies and things like that. So, yeah, perhaps Aidan, you wanna expand on that?

Yeah, yeah. so yeah, for something like with, with MyNode, they're using, everything's running On, Debian, distribution of Linux. So, basically they're using standard Linux package manager stuff like APT and Snap and installing all of these packages for, Bitcoin and Lightning and all of that stuff. now the difference here is with Embassy OS, we, we built our own package manager, right? And what it does is it, is it really, we use Docker to, you know, separate out each app so that's running in its own, virtual environment, right? With its own virtual file system, its own virtual network interface. and then we have the operating system manage a lot of things that internet services need to operate in order to run. So it manages the Tor configuration And, the ability for the user to interact with it, configure it, and so when you package up one of these services, right? You, you, you take like some binary, some application that a developer has built, you put it together with whatever minimal set of information it re- it requires, and then you have to basically Tell the user how to interact with it, right? What, what can you change about it? What else does it need? and so what we did with Embassy OS is we, we set up all these configuration files and we made it easy for a developer to basically just, define what their application needs, define how to configure it, and then just run, command line script, right? it's called AppMuggerPack on our, on our backend. And what it does is it, is it takes all of this and bundles It up into our own archival package format, and we, we can then install that and it, like, it will never-- you'll never be able to make your system- Dirty, in a sense, with one of these things. You can install it, uninstall it, and then it's completely gone. and it will interact with everything else in only the ways you want it to interact with everything else. So that's like really the huge benefit that we get over things like, MyNode, where it's just this arbitrary set of packages.

I see, yeah. So is that sort of-- I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the Nix Bitcoin project, is it kind of a similar vein to that idea?

We, we've thought a lot about using, NixOS. So, so we aren't using NixOS right now as our base distribution, but, we, we are very interested in the Nix project, and we might actually end up using a lot of their tools, going forward. But, yeah, we built a system that does something similar. Ours is based off of Docker though, instead of Nix.

Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. So, I guess just to sort of bring it to the more practical realities for a listener who's thinking, OS on my computer or if I set up a Raspberry Pi, what kind of, services or things can they expect to see?

All right, yeah, so here's where I can come in. so, you know, everything that we've just been talking about is very kind of back of house. It is what the developers see, and by developers, we mean, you know, anyone who wants to package up an open source self-hosted software service. So if there's something in the wild that you like or someone you know likes, like some sort of self-hosted note-taking app or Blockchain network, right? Another, another cryptocurrency. Doesn't matter. If there's something that you like and would like it to be very easy to run, you can, whether you are the original developer of this service or you're just somebody who wants to see it more readily available, you can, package it up using our software development kit that Aidan was just talking about. And at the end of that, what the user sees, right? The end user experience here is a sort of shopping experience that is- is very familiar to people, like on your Android or iOS or Mac OS store, you browse for services, apps that do what, you know, various things, different categories, you know, finance and word processing and whatever. and that's gonna grow very rapidly over the coming twelve to twenty-four months. and you click something that you wanna install, and it's one button, and it grabs it. And installs it on your computer. And with zero configuration, with no, you know, you didn't have to touch the command line, you didn't have to touch a dot com file, you didn't even have to know how any of this works. And a few seconds later, you are running this piece of self-hosted open source software on your own computer in your own home, and it is hosted on its own Tor v3 hidden service and accessible from any Tor-enabled browser. So you push a button and sixty seconds Seconds later, you open the Tor browser and visit a unique Tor v3 address that was created behind the scenes, and you are now using software from anywhere in the world that is running on a hardware device sitting in your home. Not only is it private, and secure, but nobody even knows that you did this. There was nobody part of this equation. So, you know, we currently offer, Bitwarden, which is a self-hosted password management, service. Now, Bitwarden also has hosted solutions, right? It's an open-source project, but they have to make money, so they have hosted solutions because they know that very few people will do the command line experience and set up their own server and run their own self-hosted password manager. So what we did is we took Bitwarden, packaged it up for the Embassy, and made it available to everyone. Anyone is a one button, right? So now anyone on Earth can run their own self-hosted, totally private Bitwarden server over Tor v3 without knowing anything I just said, without knowing any of the technologies that made that possible. Bitwarden is a very popular one. I personally use it for all my password management, my family uses it for their password management. It works in Firefox, it works in the Tor browser, it works in Brave Tor tabs. Everything we do is over Tor, absolutely everything. in terms of the user experience.

Yeah, that's cool. I use Bitwarden myself. but go on.

Yeah, Bitwarden's fantastic, right? especially if it's self-hosted. That's kind of our whole value proposition. It's like, wow, privacy and encryption are great, but if they're custodial, you're missing the revolution. You're missing the point here, right? The danger is, is in custodianship. It's in third-party trust. And it is very hard, very hard to avoid that in this world, almost Everything you do involves a trusted third party, because it's so hard to not, and we have made it easy. and we've been in the wild now for almost eight months, and we have many, many users, and they're all very happy, it works great. so let me go down the service list so far. So we have Bitwarden, which is very popular. we designed our own peer-to-peer messaging protocol that works over Tor v3, because there wasn't one, so we wrote our own. And you click a button, and sixty seconds later, it Open up a Tor browser, plug in your Tor v3 address, and what you end up with is a beautiful, simple, very simple messaging interface that I can now use your Tor v3 address, which is essentially your handle on the, on the peer-to-peer network, and send you a message And that message is arguably the most private message on Earth, right? Like we, we take the stance that although Cups is super limited in its feature set, it is arguably the most trusted, consumer messaging appl-- sorry, not the most trusted, the least trusted, and most private consumer messaging application that has ever existed, right? Not only is it end-to-end encrypted like a Signal or a Telegram secret message. But there's no third parties, right? If I'm using Cups on my phone in the Tor browser, I send a message over onion routed over Tor v3 to a server in my home. The server in my home sends an onion routed message over Tor v3 to the server in your home, and the server in your home sends that message to your phone. Nothing touches a trusted third party, everything is onion routed end to end, and everything is encrypted end to end. and to do this,

if you use Telegram or Signal also to communicate in encrypted Fashion with other people that you know. Those organizations, as well as your ISPs probably, know who you're talking to. And with something like Cups, no one on earth, not even your ISP, knows who you're talking to.

Yeah, they don't even know that you're having a conversation.

Right. Yeah, it's like knowing the social graph of a person is often more important. So that's kind of an important factor. And I guess, I know the Signal guys debate back and forward and- People debate with Signal about, contact discovery and things like that. but yeah, I guess, with the installation of these different services and things Is there ever any kind of concern around, I don't know, maybe the services that might take too much CPU or hard drive or bandwidth for someone's home connection or how do you kind of get around those kinds of concerns?

We do have to be very careful about performance, it's a, it's always a constant battle with us because we are running like on a Raspberry Pi, right? It's, it's the newest, best, beefiest Raspberry Pi, but it's still a Raspberry Pi. And so we've, we've always just been making a continual effort to, make sure that everything has the minimum possible footprint that it can, right? We stay away from things that do server-side rendering, in order to prevent, huge but- amount of latency. We try to stay away from things that rely on massive Linux distros, and We, yeah, we operate, with applications that are designed for low resource environments,

right? yeah, and, and I, I think the other part that's also tricky with these projects as well is, sometimes things just go wrong and you've got to, you know, it's kind of like, there's a bit of a tech support or there's a bit of a, like, there's a need for a kind of community Telegram channel or things like that for people to troubleshoot when, say, an upgrade goes wrong and little things like that as well. So, like I guess these are little teething issues and things like that. Do you guys see that as well with your Embassy OS and the users using Embassy?

Yes. I mean, we, we have very little insight into these devices once they leave our door. In fact, we have no insight except what is shared with us voluntarily by the users. So if somebody has a problem, there is this discovery process that has to take place of, you know, them telling us what they did and what the screen is saying, and we've- We've even had a couple, more technical people, you know, thankfully some of our very early adopters were quite technical, and so could, you know, root into the, to the, SD card and, and start doing some, some investigation in there. you know, thankfully we have had no major, issues, right? We, we haven't had any kind of disastrous, shipments that, that bricked people's boxes. we've had some bugs, which is very expected, and we are building better- Analytics tools into the OS, such that if and when things go wrong, users can voluntarily, if they want to, share, anonymized, system data with us so that we can, you know, investigate what may have gone wrong and fix it in an upcoming release. you know, a problem that we face, as a challenge I should say, is that we can't force people to update anything at all. there is no over-the-wire connection to start nine. We have no, you know, connection to your device. So The only way that you can get a new version of Bitcoin or the new version of Embassy OS is to update it manually through our marketplace. so we can't like make a fix and ship it over the wire to everybody, right? The only way that we can fix it is by making an announcement saying, "Hey, there was a bug with this previous release, if, you know, here's what it was, here's the fix, and if you wanna update it, here's the new, here's the new app." so we have to be very careful about our, our updates,

make sure that we're not shipping bad code because it, it's hard to fix.

Yeah, I'll tell you what, that's an experience I saw as well with, even with things like MyNode, where sometimes like a bug or an update might have a bug in it, and I think the, the guys over at MyNode sort of started shifting to having like a beta channel where like the more advanced users would be on that channel kind of thing before having like the, the release go out to the every-go out to everyone, that kind of thing. also, I'm The install process. So let's say they wanna buy and make their own embassy, what would that look like, and then what's the process when they wanna start, you know, using it on their phone or on their computer and things?

Yeah, so, so currently, the only way that you can get Embassy OS is by buying a embassy from us. the code is in the, in the pipeline of being open source. We've just finished our licensing and we plan to open it up in the next couple of weeks. Now, You know, part of the reason for that is 'cause we're, yeah, so it, it was a process, we wanted to make sure we did it right, and we're releasing it under a unique kind of license. it is, the entire source code will be available, and it's under a license, that is called the Start9 Personal Use License, and what it enables, anyone to do is use the source code for themselves in any way, shape, or form that they see fit. They can, view it, audit it, copy it, Whatever, use it, compile it, install it on their own Raspberry Pi, no big deal, and they can do all that for free. the only thing that the license, prohibits or restricts is the distribution of the compiled code, as in, we don't want people, you know, putting our operating system on their own Raspberry Pi, putting their brand on it, and selling it over the world, right? We have to- I see. So it's kind of like a not

for commercial use.

Correct. It's, it's not only is it not for commercial use, it's that, it's, it's a non-distribution of the compiled object code. It's like we don't want somebody compiling Embassy OS from source and then shipping the fully compiled, like bootlegged, you know, code to, over the internet to everyone.

Gotcha.

Right, so it's, it's like a minor little four-foot fence type of thing that we, are using to, you know, try to, try to maintain a business model in the open source world. It's very, very difficult to do, and we are, constantly thinking about this and constantly thinking about how to, You know, make it work i-in a way that doesn't violate any of our, our principles. And so this is a great starting point for us. so today, you buy the hardware, and it shows up at your house, you, you plug it into the wall, and you are up and running, connected, in less than sixty seconds. It's a very, very simple process that has been tested against entirely non-technical people. Anyone can set this device up, in, in about a minute. It's very easy. And you communicate with the device, you use it by visiting its unique Tor address. So when you set the device up, the setup app, we call it, right? It's just a, it's a native app for iOS and Android called the setup app. It's got one purpose in life, and that is to set up your embassy. So it comes in the mail, you open the setup app, the setup app actually passes cryptographic material, private keys, from the client in your hand, so that, you know, you know that we didn't like pre-seed the device with keys that we had. Have or something like that. The keys are generated by the client at the time of setup and then passed, encrypted to the device over the local area network using the zeroconf protocol. So the embassy will actually receive this cryptographic material and then using that material will generate a Tor v3 hidden service and spit it out at the end of the process. And so the end of the setup process, which again takes a few seconds, is a URL, a dot onion URL, and with an in- Instruction that says, "Go shove this URL into any Tor-enabled browser, and you will literally be talking to this physical device that's sitting in your home from anywhere in the world. And now that you're talking with this device that's sitting in your home, well, you can do stuff, right? What are you gonna do? Go shop, go shop for services, hit the marketplace, and browse for things that you wanna run on your own server. a couple of them I mentioned earlier, we are launching five new services tomorrow, which is part of, partly why..." I wanted to get this show scheduled is because we're in the midst of the largest release as a company that we have ever had, minus our first initial release.

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And, and a command line usually, yeah. Ours is just a browser, it's, it's a mobile responsive web app, so you are using the device in your home like you would use any website. It's, it's But it's your website and it's your device.

Alright, so look, let's ta- let's chat about some of the new services that are coming to Embassy. What are they?

well, the big story of the day is Lightning. So, you know, when we set out- To build this company, before we even knew what it was, when we thought we were building a Bitcoin operating system, the, the intent, remember, was to, to get Lightning running. I didn't like how hard it was. and so we got it. It's, it's, it's a year later, one year later, and w- instead of just having Lightning, we have this whole freaking computing paradigm. We even built our own Tor browser, which I didn't tell you about because the ones for iOS are crappy. but anyway, so as And, to emphasize the fact that we are a sort of computing platform that offers choice and, and privacy, and, you know, kind of doesn't, doesn't pass judgment on what people wanna do with their own computers and servers, we're launching both, see Lightning and LND. and users will be able to install one or both, they could run two, instances of Lightning on their server if they want. but yeah, it, it's a little bit of, choice and competition in the market

In terms of interacting then with that lightning, how would that, how would the user, like, for example, let's say that user wants to install LND on the embassy and on their computer they wanna run ZAP and connect to it, how would they do that or how would they, you know, operate the lightning node from their computer? So we, yeah, we, we

have, we have a general interface, built into this also for like exporting data from an app. So when, when you install LND, LND has some extra information that tells the operating system what information the user might want to know about it. And so for LND, the big thing is the LND connect URL. So when you're, once you're done installing LND, you start it up, you can go to the properties section of that app, and then it'll show you a QR code that you can scan with your ZAP wallet. Once you install LND, you can open up, the application page and go to the properties section, it'll show you a LND Connect QR code that you can scan with your ZAP wallet app. Or, paste it into your Zap Desktop app, and it will just use it from there. but we also are deploying with, LND as a separate service, Ride the Lightning, which is a, web application for interacting with a Lightning node. And then Ride the Lightning specifies on the Embassy that it has a dependency on LND. And then when you install Ride the Lightning, it'll automatically configure itself to be able to talk Talk to your local LND node. So once you do that, you can install RIDE of the Lightning, it'll spit out a unique Tor v3 onion URL, you paste that into your browser, and now you have a Lightning app in your browser that you can play with, and it's connected to your own Lightning node.

Great, yeah. So basically, listen, listeners who aren't familiar, check out my earlier episode with Sue Heb, we spoke about RTL, but basically you can manage your Lightning channels using this dashboard, and you can, in fact, make payments from it also, so that's cool. I, I noticed, you mentioned also, Lightning Terminal, so can you tell us a little bit about that also?

Yeah, it's actually this same situation there There, right? Lightning Terminal is just a web app, and we can, we can have it, deploy in the same way.

Awesome. And, how about on the, c-lightning side, what kind of options are there for the users who wanna do, say, c-lightning and then Spark or things like that?

Well, there's currently one option. there's only one wallet in the world right now that is capable of connecting to a remote, c-lightning node over Tor, and that is Fully Noted. That's the only one. So we, We, actually, Aiden, if you wanna talk about the HTTP,

yeah. So for a while, C-Lightning never had its own HTTP interface. and so there was no real standard for how to connect to a C-Lightning node that wasn't running on your same device. So things like Spark, things like the Lightning REST server that Ride the Lightning uses, those are all ways of trans- Forming the,

RPC interface that's on a Unix domain socket into like a REST API that app, actual like remote applications can use. and they all did it differently. we are using a very, very simple Lightning plugin, it's a c-lightning HTTP plugin that we built because Blockstream had asked us to build it. and, the one that uses that right now is fully noted. Now, Spark is something that we're looking probably to deploy soon as well, as its own app, right? Because that's a web app and we can do it that way, but there- it's just, just not ready for deployment yet, 'cause we haven't, spent the time to test that.

No, great. Well, yeah, I mean, it's good to see, it's, more options out there, because, it seems like right now, see, Lightning doesn't have as many of the options, right? I think, I think Zeus has it as well, but it's, it's one of those things where I'm, I've used, I've been using LND more myself, so I Around with Lightning and get used to, you know, using it, and I, it's still a very early space, right? I think right now for the more casual Lightning user, they might just use one of the easy phone wallet apps that are kind of, you know, have certain trade-offs and things about it, but for the, for the user who wants to be more self-sovereign, this is, a way to, to get into that.

Another thing that's interesting about this deployment here as well is that we, the Bitcoin node that we run on- The Raspberry Pi is a, it's a pruned node, and Lightning has, historically always wanted an unpruned node. in fact, for a while, I believe even LND required a TX index. That's not true anymore, but, So what we, what I had to do is I, I built a service to put in front of Bitcoin Core, which will basically allow a pruned node to pretend to not be a pruned node. and the way that it works is it, it, it services these get block requests, and if a block has been pruned from the disk already, it'll reach out to the peers over the network and validate, like fetch a block and validate it against what the prune node has already validated, what has already verified. and then it will return that back to the client that's requesting it. Now it's a little bit slower, but generally the only reason that things like LN and C Lightning need that full block index is because they occasionally need to fetch older blocks or for the initial sync, which a lot of people don't mind taking a while. And what this does is it allows people with much, much smaller resource requirements. They don't need, half a terabyte solid state drive in order to run their Lightning node. All they need Is, you know, the five hundred and fifty megabytes of space for block data and, what the other four gigs for the UTXO set, and then they're good to go

Yeah, we, we think this is a pretty big deal in terms of, you know, the, so the service that he's talking about, is, was known, you know, to very select people who were using it as BTC RPC proxy. And what it was, is a service that sat in front of your Bitcoin Core node and granted you, user accounts, fine-grained permission management, such that, you know, I could give out my Bitcoin To URL to you and set permissions on it, such that you could only make certain RPC requests, and I could ban you from making more harmful RPC requests, like ones that shut down the node. and so it was a very simple, useful little wrapper for Bitcoin Core that just, you know, allowed you to create multiple user accounts and set permissions. And what we did, what Aidan did, was go in there and augmented this service to also do, do this dynamic block Lock fetching. So what we are now calling Bitcoin Proxy will be available on our store tomorrow and is useful even outside of the context of Lightning, right? So if you are running a pruned Bitcoin node on the Embassy or otherwise, right? Let's just say you're somebody at home running a pruned Bitcoin node, you can now install Bitcoin Proxy. It's open source MIT code, right, right out on, on GitHub, and will also be available on our store. And instead of hitting your node directly, you hit your Bitcoin proxy node, and now any wallet that you are using will think that your node is a full node, a full archival node. It'll think that it's unpruned, and you can set fine-grained permission management for all the people and applications that you want to use your node. So it's a very, very useful service, even outside of the context of the Embassy or of Lightning. one of the biggest ways that it's useful is that a lot of things That, are capable of running on a pruned node, say, C-Lightning and, bTCPay, right? So both C-Lightning and bTCPay can run against a pruned node, but both of them want to control the pruning, right? They both, want to take control of Bitcoin Core and the pruning process. And so you can't run them both, right? You can only run C-Lightning and bTCPay if you're running a full archival node, until now. Now you can run a pruned node, put Bitcoin proxy in front of it, and then point both C-Lightning and BTC-Pay to your proxy URL, which will now trick both of them into thinking that they're dealing with a full archival node.

interesting. Okay, yeah, I, yeah, I didn't know that about it. Although I knew, I knew the, a common, like a standard setup for a BTC pay, even if you use, like, the web deployed lunar node, which is one that I have, it uses a pruned node and it does, for LND or C-Lightning. But I guess, yeah, what you're, what you're going to is more about being able to get, get the blocks and, tell it to, Even if it's not like that typical setup, this is more like the, what do you-- like a bare metal setup, right? Like it's on your own, device, on your own hardware. also, yeah, it's more, it's more

modular.

Yeah, right, yeah, I'm with you. a-and also while we're talking about Bitcoin Core and things. We should probably also chat about other wallets that interact with it and things like, now, for example, Specter, which I'm a fan of, recently, which I understand connect can connect through. Do you have plans to support those kinds of wallets for the users who wanna do, let's say, hardware wallets or multisig against their embassy?

Oh yeah, yeah. So Specter is one of our favorites. in fact, one of our community members did a big tutorial last week on how to hook up Specter with the Embassy. it's funny that it required a tutorial 'cause it's really, really easy. basically at the end of installing Bitcoin Core on your Embassy, a Tor address pops out, and then you take that Tor address and put it into Specter, and you're done, assuming that you have, you know, Tor running on your desktop, which Specter requires. Yeah, most of the guide was

Centered around how to set up Tor with Specter.

Yeah. So yeah, we, we really like Specter, and it works great with the Embassy, right out of the box.

And so then that could also be useful for the user who needs to, let's say, travel around and, like, as an example, let's say I've got, you know, two of three multisig and I've got three different hardware wallet devices and they're in three different safety deposit boxes or something like that, right? And I could take my laptop and I've- Say I've installed Tor onto that, and then I know the Tor address for my embassy's Specter, if you will, or Bitcoin Core, whatever, or actually Specter, and then I could go around to those three different locations or two locations rather and sign from that location, connecting back to my embassy, right?

Yes, except for that it would be your Bitcoin core, URL. Like Specter doesn't get installed on the Embassy. Specter is a totally isolated, you know, client-side wallet, and it can point to, your own self-hosted backend, similar to Fully Noted, which is where we really work best right now, right? So, you know, we are building a, a modular system where it's like you can run these backend services and then use clients that are, you know, elsewhere. That are native apps on a mobile phone or that are hosted web apps, doesn't matter, anything that is capable of saying, "Put in your back end address, put in your Tor address here, we can accommodate." And that is very, very rare. Most of the systems that, Provide like sovereign clients, where it's like, "This is your client running in your browser," has always expected you to be running the server on the same machine, right? This is like the deal with Spark and why, you know, we don't support it yet is because it makes this assumption that your full node, that your C-Lightning node is running on the machine with it. And so it, it took some creativity to figure out how to sort of break those things up such that users could selectively install something and not something else, or, you know, sort of, it's, it's more a la carte. It's an a la carte approach to personal sovereign computing as opposed to this like, you know, you can purpose your server to do this one thing, and that's kind of all it can do. It's a general purpose computer now.

Very cool. So let's chat a little bit about some of the other things that are coming up on the roadmap or any other services that you wanted to highlight, because I was just looking on your website and you've got a fair few other things that you're looking to, put on here. I mean, you've got, just on the website, I can see Pi Hole, WireGuard, Nextcloud, Matrix, WordPress, IPFS. do you wanna just chat a little bit about your ideas with those?

Yeah, I mean, our, our service roadmap is You know, it, it broadly speaking, all of open source software, anything in theory that could be run on a computer, can be run on the Embassy. That is the operating system that we, have built. Now we've put our roadmap up there because You know, we are going to take the liberty, we're going to take the initiative to package up services that we think people want, right? That we want ourselves and that we think other people want, so that we can build a business, right? It's like people want, people wanted Lightning, so we went out into the world and took it upon ourselves to take existing Lightning software, LND, C-Lightning, RIDE, the Lightning, and package it up such that it can speak Embassy OS and can be used by People who run Embassy OS. Now, in the future, we don't expect to be doing this, right? Anyone who, you know, any individual or organization that has built some open source software, probably for free on donations or because they're passionate about it and they want more freedom in the world, like, you know, oftentimes the motivation behind these open source software services is, is that, it's, it's not a business, it's that people believe these things should be available in the world because the world would be a better place with them. the problem is that nobody can run 'em, because running 'em requires the command line, et cetera, et cetera. So what we're doing is we're putting an SDK out there and telling every open source developer in the world, hey, did you, have you built something that's cool that you wish everyone could use? basically you can package it up now using our SDK

Such that everyone who's running Embassy OS, whether it's on an Embassy or on their own, you know, do-it-yourself hardware, can now download, install, configure, and run your open-source software by pushing two buttons. Right? They don't need to know anything about anything about how it works in order to run your software over Tor v3, right? Like, So we think that's a very, like, attractive, cool thing, and we already have two community developers who have now taken it upon themselves to go out into the world and package up software that they think is cool so that it can be distributed on the Embassy platform. So the Embassy has the potential to become really the platform and distribution medium that open source software has needed, in order to, you know, eat the world. world, like it just needed a, a platform, it needed a way out of the command line.

Yeah, it needed a, a certain user experience and just convenience layer to kind of pull everything together into a way that's cohesive, because, a lot of these open source pieces of software, they kind of all work on their own and you kind of need a way to kind of stitch together and make it easy for someone,

I'm also curious as well, so if you were to add a lot of these services, would that potentially be too much for, say, a Raspberry Pi four, and would you maybe look at having like a higher level computer or like, like maybe a more premium level embassy device that people could use to kind of, for example, let's say they wanted to run Nextcloud and have a lot of their hosted documents and things like that, do you think that would- Warrant going for, like, having other kinds of devices to kind of power

it? Yeah, well, so it's not, it's not just as simple. The short answer is yes, like we, we're, we plan on releasing additional devices with more power, different specifications for different use cases. But also, in addition to what we have right now, you could also just buy a second Embassy and put a different set of apps on the net, the other Embassy, if your, your original one's already overloaded. The point is you can- They're very general, like units, like a single unit of computing that you can add together, to get the full set of what you want.

Yeah, the physical location doesn't matter. And, and, you know, not only that, but because these things are ala carte, right? The fact that we offer, you know, say, a hundred services a year from now doesn't mean that you have to run any of them, right? These are available on a marketplace like the App Store, and so you have, you know, if you go to install- install Bitcoin, and then you go to install, you know, Ethereum, it's like the OS is gonna tell you, "You can't do this. It's just like you're gonna try to download this service, and you're gonna hit run, it's gonna be like, "You don't have the computing resources to run the thing that you're trying to run. So, you know, go get an external hard drive of this size and plug it in, " as in, the OS is aware of its own environment and the services that are running on it. And can provide the user with simple GUI buttons and dropdowns to, you know, explain to them what's going on and what they can do to fix it.

Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. That's, a good way for it to be built out. let's talk a little bit about sustainability and revenue and so on. I, I certainly appreciate that, you're trying to do this the, the open source way while giving people self-sovereignty. what's the thinking around revenue and keeping the model sustainable? Sustainable? Is it mainly gonna be like device sales revenue or do you have other ideas in terms of ways to keep it, a, an ongoing sustainable project?

so device sales are definitely the revenue right now, that's how we make money, and they're growing, this is actually gaining popularity, so that's great. Now we are also, because we ship internationally, have to deal with a lot of shipping and duties fees, which is a big deal, sometimes can be half the price of the device device itself. and so what we're gonna do is start selling the OS. so we are just now finishing up, our online platform that will allow people to purchase, Embassy OS from us, and, you know, just click a button, s-similar to how, you know, Microsoft sold operating systems back in the day. It's, we're, we're just gonna sell the OS. and it'll be, you know, the, the cost that we sell it at will be basically what we currently sell the hardware at minus the hardware Hardware. so, you know, the OS is really our value proposition, it's where we make money. The hardware, is, is, you know, we're not marking up the hardware per se, we're just, you know, making it, that is the most convenient way to possibly run Embassy OS is to buy a device from us and plug it into the wall. So we're selling convenience there. but for anyone who wants to build it themselves, can just go buy a Raspberry Pi four, a little speaker, like we're gonna have a little do-it-yourself kit We send them the OS, and they go to a website, type in a little, you know, product key that we ship them when they bought it, and it'll download Embassy OS onto their computer. They can then flash it, onto an SD card and put it onto the Pi. So what this does is it allows us to sell globally without worrying about shipping and distribution and, you know, regulations and customs fees and all that stuff. So we're really looking forward to being able to ship our software, globally. As well as hardware for people who want the more convenient path. and then in addition to that, you know, we are going to be getting quite involved with Lightning now that we're up and running, if we are selling, embassies and embassy OS, and facilitating the installs of Lightning Network, we're definitely gonna be getting involved. So we plan to be, pursuing the sort of, Lightning, you know, hub, Lightning service provider approach, and getting involved there. And then, you know, we also have opportunities to do, sort of trust-minimized, custodial services for people who want, say, cloud backups of all their data, because keep in mind, you are storing- You know, the, the price of total trustless sovereignty is responsibility. all your critical personal data is sitting on a hardware device in your home. And currently, we allow you to do backups using a USB stick, right? You put the USB stick into the Pi, it pops up on the Embassy OS GUI, and you can, you know, backup your service data and then take the USB stick and put it, you know, somewhere safe. but that's not super convenient and it's very manual. and so- So we are exploring, monetization opportunities around, you know, totally anonymous encrypted cloud backups, and, potentially even notifications, right? So how do you know what's going on, with the device in your home? and if you can't get emails and phone calls and text messages and push notifications about it, and all that stuff is extremely trusted and, very dangerous if, you know, not done properly. So we are working on some sort of distributed protocols where we wouldn't be the only marketplace participant, but building out sort of distributed networks of, quote-unquote, post offices where people could, you know, set up their own Twilio account in AWS, you know, S Email server and serve as a service provider, a sort of, liaison or, or facilitator of, of, notifications for others, around the world for, fees over the Lightning network.

Ma- mainly to like interface with the legacy systems, right? 'Cause things like email and text are all very, very centralized and very custodial.

So you can sort of federate, those to a degree and, you know, allow trusted marketplace participants to provide services, to individuals, and sort of relay communications, on their behalf, encrypt it fully, obviously, but, you know, those are more on the sort of speculative, you know, e-evolutionary track for our company. we believe that the- The opportunities for us to participate in the new economy will be tremendous, and we will be extremely opportunistic as they come about. But what we're really happy about is that we have this like very brick and mortar, tried and true business model, like this gritty, low level business model where we, we don't need some sort of like You know, angle on the, on the decentralized economy to have our business. we're not sort of rolling the dice in that sense. We have a fantastic product that involves real world logistics that, has never been seen before, and we are selling it, and we have been selling it for almost a year now, and people, our customers are very happy. They, they love us, and they're telling their friends, and our sales are growing.

Well, that's great to hear, and I think, it's a really ambitious- This project, but it's one that I wanna-- I would like to see this kind of, you know, these kinds of projects do really well because I think it allows just a whole new level of self-sovereignty for people out there. So, guys, thank-- thanks for joining me, and, if you had any closing thoughts and where can listeners find you online?

Our website is start nine labs dot com. we also have a Tor v3 brochure website, it's just a mirror of the dot com website, which I don't have memorized, but it's, it's online. And yeah, I mean, that's, that's where you go to learn about us, it's where you go to buy an embassy. and then lastly, I just wanted to, to seal up here, I know we're out of time, the fifth service that we're launching tomorrow, we never got to talk about

it, You know, share a one time ephemeral self destructing message by sharing a link with somebody. so PaySpam will now be available on the Embassy starting tomorrow, and it's just like ViaCrypt except self hosted. There's no ViaCrypt, there's no central server. So arguably, it is the like darkest, most secret, craziest way to share information across the world that has ever been available to a non technical user.

Thanks, Matt and Aidan, for joining me on the show today.

Yeah, thank you. Thanks, Aidan. Thanks for having us.

Get the show notes at stephanlivera.com/225. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the citadels.