OpenSats: Bitcoin & Open Source Initiative

Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin. So we talk about stacking Sats and regularly accumulating Bitcoin, but I think it's also valuable to think about how are we regularly supporting Bitcoin. Today we're talking with Matt Odell and Ben Price, who are starting up this new initiative called OpenSats. It's a new way for Bitcoiners to- contribute to supporting Bitcoin and open source development and projects. So we talk about various ideas around this, the structure of it, why they're doing this, and why Bitcoin development funding shouldn't merely be a popularity contest. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin holds a deep conviction that Bitcoin is the future of money. Swan's aim is to help you maximize your position in this dominant digital monetary network. As a Swan private client, you will have unlimited access to their team strategic resources. and commitment to Bitcoin education. Bitcoin is an asymmetric investment of unparalleled proportions, rapidly becoming the preeminent wealth preservation asset for every individual and institution in the world. An opportunity like this to build and preserve legacy impacting wealth for your family or company will not likely be seen again in our lifetimes. The Swan Private team stands ready to earn the right to walk alongside you on every step of this journey into the future of money. Learn more at swanbitcoin dot com slash private. That's swanbitcoin dot com slash private. Or email CEO Corey Clipston directly corey at swanbitcoin dot com. Lend at HoddleHoddle is a peer to peer Bitcoin backed lending platform so you can lend and borrow crypto globally and anonymously. If you have stablecoins like USDT or others, lend at HoddleHoddle is a way to earn extra income. Also, you no longer need to sell your Bitcoin to get some liquidity. Lend at HoddleHoddle allows you to borrow against your Bitcoin, and you will still hold one key in the two of three multi-signature controlling your Bitcoin during that loan HodlHodl doesn't hold your funds. Lend at HodlHodl allows peer-to-peer lending and borrowing directly between users. With this platform, you set your own terms and put up offers depending on how long you want to borrow or lend and the interest rate. Go to lend dot hodl hodl dot com. Are you looking to get involved with mining? Compos is an online marketplace making it easier for everyone to mine Bitcoin. Compos is the anti-cloud mining option. You buy your own ASIC and secure hosting at great facilities around the world. So for years we've been We've heard that mining is only profitable if you're investing tons of money, but with CompuS, now everyone can tap into those economies of scale and access reasonably priced hardware and cheap industrial power rates instead of our residential power rates which may not be competitive. So if you're unsure about how to get started, they've got hardware and hosting bundles so you don't need advanced technical knowledge, you can get started quickly. So go to compusmining dot io and start mining Bitcoin today. Ben and Matt, welcome to the show. Thanks, man. I'm excited to be here. Pleasure as always. Awesome. So, Matt, everyone knows you, but Ben, tell us about yourself. Oh, that's

a, that's a broad question, Stefan. let's see. I, I'm a, I guess we'll start kind of, back at childhood. I grew up in North Carolina, so I'm a good, good southerner, I guess. went to Chapel Hill, so UNC, go Tar Heels. there's actually quite a few Tar Heels in the space, so that's cool It's like way after I graduated, it wasn't really learning economics, but kind of like the, the standard public school version, which is very pro Keynesian, but, kind of taught myself how to code after school, dove into the, the tech space, did some consulting, did some startup work, and then, found Bitcoin, and at that point, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do, but I knew it had to be something in the field, related to Bitcoin. So kind of like threw my, threw my resume World Visa Crypto decided to pick me up, worked there for a couple years and recently left, this January to start Opensats and, to create my own startup. So that's a, a very condensed version of what about me.

Yeah, cool, cool. So, I mean, Opensats is a cool idea and, yeah, I wanted to chat with you guys to get your point of view, like, what, why are you doing this? What's it all about? So, what, what was it that made you guys see the need for this Opensats initiative

I'll start here, Matt can kinda jump in. I think he was one of the first people I reached out to, but back in August of twenty twenty, I think I was playing around with BTC Pay Server and trying to create a, just like a stupid little website that sold, I think it was just like t-shirts or I can't even remember what I was trying to sell, but I just wanted to donate all the proceeds to core developers, I didn't wanna have to worry about taxes or any of that stuff, so I was just gonna give everything back and didn't really That seemed like a good option to just give to. There was GitHub Sponsors, so that probably would have been what I used, but at the time, I reached out to Matt, reached out to a few other people, and asked around, like thought maybe I was just like not in the know, but it didn't, there really didn't seem to be any kind of charities or, nonprofits that were kind of distributing funds on behalf of people that wanted to donate, and so whether it was smart or not, I kinda just decided like, how hard could it

reached out to a few other people and decided to spin it up.

Let me jump in here. I mean, so Ben reached out, he was like, listener of the podcast, big fan of your work, complete nim, had no idea who he was, twenty twenty. he's, he said exactly what he just told you. And at that point, it's important to realize we didn't have Brink yet and we didn't have HRF yet, so there was no five o one C three where you could donate to Bitcoin developers. It also seems like a massive regulatory headache. I don't wanna fucking deal with it. I will help you in any way I can possibly help you without having to fucking deal with any of that paperwork. I was like, I don't wanna deal with any of that paperwork. And then I started talking to Dennis Reinman and we built BitcoinDevilist dot com so that I didn't have to deal with any regulatory paperwork. Everything's passed, like nothing gets touched by a central entity, it's just their own BTC pay servers and their own GitHub sponsor pages. And what happened was, it quickly became obvious that People wanted a way to give to a managed fund that they could just trust who was in charge there to make appropriate allocation decisions. They wanted a basically like a, a group of, of plebs, to be deciding where their donations would go, and they really liked the idea of giving a recurring donation. So the idea of giving, you know, fifty dollars a month, to a managed fund and having them donate to open source development. and so I, I basically like the market, approved approved of what Ben said, you know, he, they were, they, they basically demanded Opensats, and it's just been a long ass road since then, and I'm pretty excited that we're finally launching. Yeah, that's cool. So

let me fill in some of the context there. I think, and I've had a similar experience as well in terms of listeners, my listeners reaching out to me saying, "Oh, hey man, I wanna donate, but who to?" And, and then I might sort of give them a name or two, but the reality is if somebody

is

And devlist dot com and not, not know who they wanna give money to. And so I think, that's actually reflected in my own experience, with my own listeners reaching out to me on who should I give to and things like that. So I've definitely seen that as well. so

I, I guess it's overwhelming, and it's, it's, it turns into a popularity contest. There's like one or two devs that get the majority of donations because people get overwhelmed and they just do the obvious ones. And then there's a ton of projects that just aren't Money, I would go a really long way. Yeah, right.

Yeah, and backing up a little bit, credit where credits due, I think, ironically or funnily or I don't know, but it tested my willpower 'cause about a week after I said like, "Screw it, I'm gonna start this," I think HRF's Privacy Fund launched. Yep. I think like a couple months later, Brink launched, and so I was just like, "Am I just repeating what's in the space?" And maybe the answer is yes, I think we have a nice And so he was, he said, "You know, we gotta distribute, we gotta keep everything decentralized." Talked to a couple, couple other people in the space. Steve Lee was, really influential early on, and, you know, we just talked about how, you know, all funding should be, distributed. And so he, he gave me a little more willpower to continue pushing because, it was a little bit harder than I thought to launch this, and, you know, seeing HRF and Brink and some of the other great organizations in the

Right, cool. And, and as Steve Lee has mentioned, I think actually on my podcast he's mentioned this as well, this idea of having multiple development organizations, not just relying on, say, Blockstream or Chaincode Labs. We've got MIT DCI, MIT DCI. There's individual, sponsors and donor people out there. There are exchanges donating. Now we've got HRF, we've got Brink, now we have OpenSats, so Square Crypto, and Square Crypto. Yeah, sorry, yeah, another big one. And these are all relatively

recent Happening so quickly, 'cause there is kind of a, a scary vulnerable period, right, where you might only have like one or two while you're bootstrapping, and it's, it's to get past that is very important, and it seems like we're, we're almost past that, that hurdle. There was also another piece

where I, I think some, you guys touched on, if you're maybe not extremely technical, or even if you're deep in the weeds, you still might not know exactly who's doing what or who to give to. And I think, honestly, I fall into that category, which is why I tried to bring on a bunch of people who are smarter than myself who can, who can help make that direction, o-of funds. But I think, w-in my talks with a lot of the exchanges, a lot of the people who I was asking kind of for

Terms length organization, because, I think honestly speaking, Bitcoiners can be a little bit controversial, and, and some, more than others are hard to like directly associate your brand name with, even if you love what they're doing, even if they're doing amazing things for the community in the world, it might be a little risky to like just give 'em a hundred K. And, so I think, I think, you know, having a kind of intermediate organi- or intermediary organization, that sits in between and really has no, Conflict of interest or isn't trying to make money in any way, shape or form, we can really just give people, controversial or not, money to do great work, and, and I think that's, that's an added benefit for a lot of organizations who might have, stockholders and shareholders to please.

Right, right. You're, providing a middleman service where actually a middleman service is required in some cases, right? Middle, like people like to attack the idea of middlemen, but in some cases, well, generally speaking, in a free market The reason that person is there, so that's interesting as well. Now, of course, going back a few years, there was some of the earlier drama, which I'm sure people, you know, maybe some of the newer listeners might not be familiar with that, but historically, there was a bit of a concern around this thing called the Bitcoin Foundation, and then in twenty eighteen, there was another one, we had another flare-up on this similar kind of drama called the B, right? And so the concern at that time from the community was something like, "These people are claiming to

They've got all these influencers on their side and, you know, et cetera. Where I think now the environment has shifted because now there are multiple organizations. What are you guys seeing?

So let me just jump in here real quick. we're very cognizant of, that concern. I remember I was very outspoken against, the Bitcoin Foundation, a little bit about the B, but less so. I mean, I think it was definitely a different environment. There's a lot more teams out there doing this kind of work. I think a we have no intention of speaking for Bitcoin. the mission of the actual organization is purely funding open source contributors, so it's actually not only Bitcoin. We will not be funding shitcoiners at all, but we will be funding, you know, parallel open source projects that could help Bitcoin, things like secure messaging or like a Tor replacement, stuff like that. so the idea isn't actually necessarily the, the focus, the whole mission isn't just Bitcoin. The mission is basically taking our Sats and weaponizing our Sats to make- The world that we wanna see. and I think that's, this is also something to keep in mind here of how we're different from the other organizations. A lot of these other organizations are more corporate, they're more, more highly focused on Bitcoin. We are a hundred percent pass-through, we're not taking a cent. No one on our board is getting paid, any money for this. I mean, you said like, there's a reason there's a middleman because of a free market, there's no free market here. we're just, you know, we're Of Bitcoiners that have very strong reputations in the space, and all decisions will go through this board, it will be highly transparent so people see what is happening there. And then last but not least, what I think is really cool that, that makes us different, is that even though we will be accepting credit card donations, which by the way, Ledger will be sponsoring the processing fees, so we're not even losing the processing fees. If you donate a hundred dollars through credit card, we get the full hundred dollars. All those proceeds are getting converted into Sats as soon as we receive any fiat Donations will be held as Sats and all grants will be given as Sats, so we are very aligned with the community in that respect.

So there's a couple things I wanna add. Matt said there's no free market, I would argue the opposite, like there's absolutely a free market as where you wanna send your funds, is absolutely your choice if, if you want to. there is a general fund where, you know, we've put together a, a great board of bitcoiners whose, whose reputation kind of, I think, defines them, My hope is that we're, we're making little to no decisions. I think a lot of people are gonna donate to the general fund. You're completely

wrong. The general fund is gonna be the majority. Yeah.

I, I'm with Matt. I think it'll be a general fund as well. But, but go on, make your case. Yeah.

So, like, I hate that idea. I love the-- This is, I think everyone has like a slightly differing opinion on the board, which is why it's healthy. But, like, I-- We're, we're building a platform

Like shitcoinery going on. And as long as you're contributing to a free and open source project like Bitcoin Core or something ancillary that kind of, supports the, the technology to reach its fullest potential, then you'll get approved to get listed for our site. And, and anyone can directly kind of say, "I wanna fund this project." and so I'm hoping that's where a lot of kind of donations go through, where people pick and choose, and then the board has no say. It's really just, you know, if you wanna donate to the Tor Foundation server. Or if you really love the idea of Taproot, or some other kind of, you know, BIP, you can, you can donate specifically to that. Now, you know, again, I think there's gonna be a lot of organizations that, kind of keep their hands off, want, are gonna rely on the board to determine, you know, where the money might go the furthest. And, and I think honestly, we've, we've put together an amazing board, and then, yes, Stephane, you mentioned one thing where

Third or fourth grade, my mom always used to make us throw out all our crap to Goodwill, and, when I, when I learned one day that the, the CEO of Goodwill, which is a charity in, at least where I grew up, was making like a million dollars a year, I was just so angry. And so, like, one of the, the core things that I started this on was like it had to be a hundred percent pass-through. I didn't want anyone to make any money, you know, I wanted it to be just like

You know, just takes so much off the top. And so our goal from day one, most importantly, was be a hundred percent pass-through, and that was really hard to accomplish, but luckily we've had some amazing sponsors. some people like Silvergate are, you know, waiving all of our banking fees. Other people like River are waiving all of our kind of fiat to Bitcoin conversions. Matt mentioned Ledger is picking up, you know, fiat, credit card processing fees, 'cause God knows the banks wouldn't waive those. other than Silvergate, which, That's like, you know, they, they did a good job, but, you know, luckily all these people in the space who have made a killing off of Bitcoin and the open source developers that support it, they've been willing to give back, and, you know, shout out to everyone for that.

Notel Cloud is-- Yeah, that's awesome. We're using Notel Cloud for our, our backend, they're gonna also be hosting the website.

yeah, BTC Pay server, obviously, like they-- We didn't even have to ask them, they just,

What I wanna see is, I wanna see the weaponization of the plebs. Like, I wanna see, you know, if we can get a thousand, two thousand plebs to give us fifty dollars, twenty-five dollars a month, then all of a sudden we're not wed to any kind of corporate sponsors, which I think would be pretty fucking cool. We'll still get the corporate donations hopefully, and we'll still be encouraging them, but it'd be cool if we just had this base, and I think it's something that the other organizations aren't really even attempting to

When people have a-- well, even in like a religious context, sometimes people tithe to their church, right? So it's kind of like, you might be a stacker and you're out there stacking Bitcoin, and then you tithe a small amount to have, to have, to keep the system running and to keep the thing developing and to keep, for example, I know that's, that's always been a focus, in terms of Bitcoin Core contributions, they're always looking for more people who are able to proactively engage and review the code and

It can be difficult to find someone with that skill set.

And it's like specifically we're, we're tapping into that flow, right? Because, you know, Stefan, Ben, like we know like that auto-stacking flow is something that a lot of people have com- become comfortable with, and that's how they like to interact with Bitcoin. Well, now we're making it so you can auto-stack directly into a dev fund, right? And so you have a portion for that, and you have a portion for yourself. I feel like conceptually it's very easy for people to understand. And just With us. I mean, we've had a lot of work so far, I think we're gonna have a lot more work ahead of us. I'm not sure if we all are aware of what we signed up for. I kind of was just like, "Bullish, let's fucking go," but, you know, it's, it's really-- I think it's really important to give back, and it's important that people that are in leadership positions and have an audience, you know, provide a proper example to, to everyone else, because, because

ultimately, CoinKite, Greg Foss, Jeremy Rubin, John Pfeffer, Ledger, Nodal, Silvergate, Swan Bitcoin, ten thirty one, who's actually, this new kind of Bitcoin VC fund that's donating their management fees kind of in a DCA fashion, so long term, they're contributing their, you know, two and twenty or whatever percent they're taking, and then especially shout out to, Castle Nine, who's, he's, I think CTO of Ducks Reserve, he's been helping build the entire website, the entire donation platform Amazing work on his part. He's contributed all his time for free. And then a couple anonymous people who don't wanna be named, but, we have an accountant that's doing all the backend work. We already have a lawyer that stepped up to do pro bono, and, a designer, friend of mine who doesn't wish to be named, also has been helping, on that front. So like, there's a lot of other people that have, have really supported and helped, but, you know, just, just like, it's,

Well, I mean, even the whole-- 'Cause that's the thing, if we were to rewind the clock one or two years, there were discussions about this kind of thing, but it was always, "Ah, there's like, there's a whole process around trying to get five o one C three charity status so that the donation is now tax-deductible." Because that was the other thing, people who wanted to give fiat wanted to get a donation, get the, tax deduction for that. So I'm sure there's been a lot of work on, on the part of you

It's actually the-- Big disclaimer, big disclaimer though, we are five o one C three pending. we are, we are incorporated in North Carolina as a charitable organization. My, my lawyer would kill me if I didn't say this. but, we are five o one C three pending, so all donations, you know, given that we get approved by the IRS, which I think we will, you know, they will be tax-deductible retroactively. But as of, as of today, as of this recording, we are not technically a

five o Crypto, I don't think is five o one C three, and HRF was already five o one C three from their human rights aspect, and then they bridged it in. So we're going the brink path. to be clear here, Stefan, you said people want their fiat donations to be tax deductible. Actually, the big pull is in after a big bull market, and people have big Bitcoin gains, they want their Bitcoin direct donations to be five o one C three. But I actually think, and I said this to Ben, but Ben's really, you know, he's, he's I said to you from the very beginning, I think it doesn't really matter. I think ultimately, I don't care. I, you know, I've been giving through GitHub Sponsors, just auto-stacking to devs, through credit card or whatever, just like automatic 'cause it was easy, and I don't care about the donations, like the, the tax deductableness part of it. I think, and, and it's only in the United States anyway that, that we get five hundred and one C

three. And the further we go in, the, the more I'm actually

in yet. So if you're out there, you know who you're, you know who I'm talking to. But, most of them, most of them have basically said like, you know, we, we have creative ways to write this off, whether it's, you know, funding X, Y, or Z or development. and then, like personally, and I think I, I don't speak for everyone, but I know at least a few other friends who are, you know, donating twenty, thirty, forty, fifty bucks here, there. I've never claimed

Doing this for, for tax deductibility. And it's, it's, yeah, I think we, if we see a really big Bitcoin bull run, that might be when, five o one C three donations start to matter a, a little more. But I, I do think, ninety-ish percent of people probably, you know, won't be deducting, there'll probably be a lot of anonymous donations. I haven't heard one corporate-like kind of person who, who has like specifically mentioned that as a problem. So I think it's just gonna be a weird niche use hasn't, hasn't come up in too many conversations.

It's like if, if, if you donate through credit card and it's a small amount, it's like, who cares? And then if you donate through Bitcoin, it just feels, to me, it just feels counterintuitive to Bitcoin that, like, right now with HRF, I was talking to our, our buddy Gladstein over there, about it, and like, if you want a tax deductible Bitcoin donation through them, you pay their BTC Pay server, and then you basically like, reach out to them and ask for

Antithetical to Bitcoin, it's like I might as well just give fiat at that point instead of, you know, doing that process. So

yeah, right. So I think it would-- This would be in the case where they are a hodler and obviously we've just gone through a bull run and then they don't wanna have to have a tax event because if they donate and then there's also a tax event, it's gonna be like double whammy for them to make that donation. So I think that's-- For some people, they might wanna donate twenty, thirty, fifty K and not Some people, and it may be that there's a bunch of, you know, maybe not super wealthy, but call it high net worth Bitcoin hodlers out there who wanna donate, but they don't wanna like get, they just don't wanna double whammy hit when they donate, that's all.

There's two use cases I've actually seen that a five or one C three would be especially beneficial, and the first is when, like you just said, when you wanna donate, let's just say a hundred K, and you have, you know, you can either sell your Bitcoin and have

Bitcoin directly and not actually have to cash out, and there's no capital gains, and so that, that actually, you know, you can actually send a lot more value to the charity in that case. And then the second reason I've actually seen, which is really clever, and I think I read about this from, the guys over at The Giving Block, which maybe I can send you the link, but it was just like a quick write-up, but you can actually raise your cost basis, of your, of your Bitcoin funds without, without like taking any but essentially, if you, you know, if you wanna donate ten K, of Bitcoin, what you can do is, you can donate your like lowest cost basis coins and then take that like ten thousand dollar tax write off and then buy Bitcoin today with ten thousand dollars in fiat, which you would have otherwise donated, and raise your cost basis to whatever it is today. So there are a lot of people who are kind of, you know, cleverly, you know, not paying the IRS.

Well, I mean, if it's legal, let's People should know about it, right? Because this may be a way that people can, very legal, otherwise minimize their tax burden and still, you know, maximize their sat stacking while doing it, you know, that it might actually be a real big benefit there for people out there. so well, well worth looking into for those of you who are perhaps in that situation where, you know, maybe a lot of your sats are KYC'd, and you can legally kind of, do this strategy, it might actually help you that way. So, yeah, you can always don Yeah. Well, that's it, yeah. so let's chat a little bit about some of the different skill sets and areas, and actually, that's the other thing. So if somebody is, looking on this, on the website, and I, and I know things are early right now, we don't have like all the projects up there, but are you thinking that you might have different, pools that a person can donate into? So you might have the general one, and then you might have, I don't know, Bitcoin Core or like, what's the, what Okay,

sorry, I was on mute there. so I think there's, there's a lot of long-term plans and there's a lot of short-term plans. I think right now we're just trying to get any sort of kind of marketplace up. So we want, we want people to be able to, you know, donate directly to the projects that they, you know, that the board has approved that are good for Bitcoin, are good for the world, that support our charitable cause and mission of supporting free and open source contributors. And so we're gonna get a bunch of, projects

Grants on a quarterly basis. And then long term, I think the, I think the goal is kind of what, what Matt and, team did there at, at Bitcoin DevList, which is we're actually already open source kind of our, our pre-launch site. but the idea is whenever we get the platform live, there's already been a ton of feature requests. So, there's this kind of weird problem where, what if there are multiple contributors to one project? How are we distributing funds? And honestly, like, we're just trying to build something,

So, there's gonna be a lot of features that, that we could use community help to build out, but, but one big thing that I'm really excited about is kind of like an initiatives page or a GoFundMe style page where OpenSats can, you know, choose a project like Bitcoin Beach maybe, and, we can say, "We're gonna raise ten K for that," or maybe it's, a teacher in, you know, some country that is teaching kids how to code on Bitcoin Core and they need laptops. And if that's an initiative we wanna support

there. And so we can kind of pick and choose in that way, we can pre-list and approve projects, where people come and apply to our site, or we can give grants directly, and, and that's what we have in mind so far. But honestly, who knows? Like, this has all happened within, I think, eight months, so I'm sure there will be plenty of, amazing community, recommendations, and I'm just hoping people chip in and just build the things they

wanna see. Back to the show in a moment. Have you thought about your

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Yeah, I mean, one, yeah, one Bitcoin equals one Bitcoin, Stephane. that's, that's kinda, that's kinda what If you zoom out a little bit, which I think almost every open source contributor, has the ability to do, I mean, hell, they're, they're contributing their, their time freely for, something that probably a lot of, a lot of people will never even see their name on, so I, I think that like the goal here is to make sure that we like maximize, what we can in the long term, and I think like if you're asking me, even with, even with a fiat drawdown, I think most of these people are probably gonna try I don't think there's gonna be a lot of conversion back to fiat on the other side of this. That being said, we, we are trying to automate, you know, be, being a hundred percent pass-through. we're trying to automate everything, so we, you know, Silvergate is our, is our bank. The second we, receive any fiat donations, we're attached to the Silvergate exchange network, which is this cool thing that lets you move money twenty-four-seven to exchanges, at least, at least cryptocurrency exchanges and, our And yes, that means during weeks like this, technically our fiat, you know, value will go down, but our Bitcoin, stays the same, and that's really what, what we care about and what I think our contributors care about.

There, there's, you know, there's a couple things here, right? You know, first of all, you gotta start somewhere, right? And I think we're all trying to make this Bitcoin circular economy a reality. You know, we're all, we're all living in a world where we wanna see Sats become the standard, so

doesn't want to receive Sats, then they should go to some other organization. That, those contributors, those projects, they can go and they can convert Sats to their local currency, they can do whatever they want with it after that, then it's their Sats, right? They can, they can do whatever they want. So if they wanna hedge themselves, they can hedge themselves. As an organization, we will probably never be sitting on large amounts of funds to begin with, but if we are, you know, I, I think the upwards price movement of Bitcoin is a net benefit. Like,

Jack Dorsey did it. Was it with Jay Z? He did the African donation fund. Yeah, he, I think he gave, was it fifty BTC or five hundred? Right. So he gave fifty Bitcoin, like that endowment of fifty Bitcoin could just last forever if, if number keeps going up, right? As we expect it to, it could end up being one of the largest endowments in the world, you know, at the end of the day. So I think it, it behooves us to, to participate in that poten-- potential, practice what we Pointer, if I'm giving fiat to an organization that's supposed to be, you know, a Bitcoin first organization, like I think it's kind of cool that they're providing upward price pressure as, as, as my donations are coming in. Like, I just think that's like a little aspect that, like, sure, like if you're, you know, a pre-corner and you're not exposed to Bitcoin yet, you might think that, think of that as a negative, like, "Why are you taking transaction fees when the US dollar is the best money in the world?" You know? GitHub sponsors versus direct to someone's BTC pay with Bitcoin, the fact that the organization is, is auto-stacking with my donations would be a net, net positive. Yeah, for sure, for sure.

And we've already seen this actually. Shout out to Greg Foss, who was actually the first person, who, who tangibly kind of gave something. And I'm not gonna doc how much he gave or whatever, but it was, you know, s-- it was way back when I kind of wanted to start this in August of last year, maybe September. And I reached out to Bitcoin. And, I mean, you can kind of do the math yourself what the price is was in August, even after this massive drawdown of fifty percent in the last kind of week or so, you know, he, his, his donation has three xed, or at least in fiat terms, and, you know, had we, had we distributed it, you know, a month ago, it would have been six or seven x. And so I think long term, we're, we're gonna trend in the right direction by, by holding fiat. And yeah, I, I love, Limits, we're not timing the market, we're just smash buying, so I think like, everyone can kind of relate to that. Yeah,

yeah, for

sure.

The, and just another anecdote, you know, HRF, I remember last year they gave one Bitcoin to three different open source contributors, and at the time it was ten thousand dollars, right? And, you know, so, so the grant, the grants they keep on giving, and I think all, you know, pretty much all of us in this space have, you know, we're at least We understand it's gonna be volatile short term, so it is what it is. Yeah, and in

my discussions with people as well, I've seen, as in, on the recipient side, most of them are very happy to take Bitcoin, right? So it's really, it's, it's really more just about for people who are new to the space and they're, maybe they're not as hardcore into it. That's, that's probably the kind of question that they might be thinking about, and I guess the answer is, well, we just deal with

Basically doing

the, the last piece is honestly though, we, we don't have a lot of balance sheet risk. So because we're automating everything and a lot of, our banks, our fiat, like our, our payment processing, our development, our legal work, everything is kind of being contributed free of cost. And that's really where, you know, you wanna, you wanna make sure you have enough fiat for your short term fiat liabilities, and we really don't have any. The only thing is payment processing, and we have a corporate sponsor, luckily, to, to pick that up You know, while, while our, our balance sheet might go down in fiat terms, that really doesn't affect our operations, and, we can, we can feel safe just knowing we're, we're hodling Bitcoin, and honestly, that'll, that'll work out for us more often than it doesn't. But the, the last, the, the automating operations and having people, you know, not charge us for the work they do has, has really been helpful.

Two, two other aspects I just wanna jump in here before we move on, the Ben keeps saying Up in a situation that I'm hoping for where we have a thousand, two thousand plebs giving a constant amount every month. It's con- it's a, it's a nice situation to be in as a nonprofit because we have, you know, expected cash flow. We know like where, what money's gonna come next instead of like one big grant from a whale or one big grant from an exchange that, that might be in between like ten weeks or twenty weeks between we get the next big one. So it's kind of nice that we have this expected cash flow. And I said in the beginning circular

At scale, right? If we're talking two thousand, three thousand plebs are giving fifty, fifty dollars a month, right? Three thousand plebs giving us fifty dollars a month is a hundred and fifty thousand dollars that is auto going into Bitcoin and that is available for open source contributors that are outside of Bitcoin, right? So all of a sudden at scale, you end up in a situation where open source contributors, some of the smartest people globally that are looking for money that are in projects that are helpful for Bitcoiners, but that aren't exactly Bitcoin related, it's, it's, it's gonna Among them, because they're gonna need to learn how to accept Bitcoin if they want a grant from us. So if we're offering them, you know, twenty-five, thirty thousand dollars that they really need, they're gonna go out and figure out how to use Bitcoin, and who knows, maybe their project ends up incorporating Bitcoin more, maybe their next project, you know, is Bitcoin related. So I think, it can create a really nice viral feedback loop because we're going as Bitcoin only as I think reasonable possible right now, which is we're still accepting fiat on the inroad, but that

I definitely agree that there is a network effect benefit to having this as a Bitcoin focused organization. so when it comes to giving grants, there are different approaches I have seen. Some in the space take a, "We're going to pay you this grant for this specific outcome, "or "We want you to work on this specific thing," and then other people in the space just take it as like a, "We know you're working on Bitcoin Core as a maintainer, here's money, you decide what you think is best." What kind of approach are you guys looking at? How are you thinking about that?

Right now, I think we're, we're still figuring it out. We've, we've asked for a lot of feedback from the community as well as our donors who, who have, who have given to us already, as well as some of like kind of the enterprise level donors who might be given the bigger chunks. And a couple people have, have expressed, kind of concern with the fully open model where it's just give the money away and, and hope that the person keeps contributing. And some people like the idea of kind of having no strings attached

That being said, we don't have all the answers here. We, we're kind of, iterating as we, as we go along, but, some of the few things that, that we think we can kind of, at least that we're putting into place now are, we're only gonna be paying out, I think, in, in monthly, kind of increments, and we are gonna expect some sort of, results from the, from the developers or the contributors, in, in, in some sense. So we are gonna be kind of tracking what you

basically we would love like a, a monthly update or potentially a quarterly update, or we'd love you to help contribute to some community content or, or, or some, some sense of like giving back to the community. But I, I think it's, it's gonna be an iterative thing. no one has the perfect solution, and we're not pretending like we do. But, I, I do have a little like, and this is my personal opinion, the reason we've got a huge board is 'cause other people feel differently, but, you know, I Hillstones and, and things to, any money given out, and then kind of, having some sort of baseline expectation of, of results. But, again, Matt might feel totally differently, and, you know, our seven other board members, I'm sure, have their own opinions, and that's kind of the beauty of it. And,

yeah, we have, we have very strong opinions on our board. I don't think we've listed the board members yet, we'll do that in a second, but, just, I, I tend to Like to be as, as open as possible to, you know, resemble the open source community that we're trying to support, so we're gonna be taking a lot of commentary, in terms of, of reports, I really like the aspect on GitHub sponsors that, that they, they, you can optionally give them your email and they can email you updates if you're supporting them, which I think it makes you way more, it's like a Patreon aspect, you know, where it makes you feel like way more involved with the process, and that's not even like a policing updates Between the donor and the receiver of, of the donation. so that's something that we're gonna work towards. I mean, it's not gonna be in the original, you know, in the, in the beginning, the beginning product that we have, but that's the goal coming forward. And then, the other, the other thing that I wanted to add was that me personally, I like the idea of more open-ended, less strings attached donations. That's just my personal preference, and I think the best way to mitigate concerns there about the donations, you know, A beneficial cause is that you keep them on the smaller side. So rather than giving out, you know, one huge donation, one huge grant, you give them smaller grants that are paid out over time, and then there's more reputational risk on the line there, right? Like if they're not doing something six months down the line, then the grant stop or something to that effect.

Yeah.

But these, these, these details are all gonna be iterated on. Yeah, of course,

yeah. So I guess just to spell out some of the different concerns and from different perspectives that I have The kind of work I do, it doesn't necessarily have a defined, you know, outcome or it might be review time, and so maybe then the outcome is more-- or it's, they don't want to have too many strings attached because they, they feel like that's not really reflecting the actual work that they've done. Or in other cases, it might be they contributing to Bitcoin Core, but Bitcoin Core doesn't necessarily have to take, you know, the other contributors or, let's say, the other reviewers or the maintainers of the project are saying, "Well, we don't want that

One of their concerns. But then, a-and then obviously on the donor side, they wanna feel, they might wanna feel like, "Oh, I, I want- I'm paying for this certain outcome, how come I'm not getting..." You know? So I guess that's some of the different concerns that people might have, but I think at the end of the day, it's not, people still find a way to make it work and, you know, in, maybe in some cases it will be a tied to a specific project, or in other cases it will be a bit

It's gonna be messy, I think that's kind of unavoidable, but we're gonna try our best and we're gonna be as open as possible, which I think is, you know, the two main things you really have to do. And I, just to add there, I mean, one big concern I see from the dev community is, is this idea of stability, that they don't wanna be rug pulled on their grant. You know, they wanna know, you know, they're gonna be able to pay their rent and they're gonna be able to focus on this work.

Certainty, you know, and give them good communication on our end, but at the same time, we're gonna have to keep them honest, and that's never gonna be a clean process, and we're just gonna have to do our best, and, and the, the board was selected as people that, you know, are more familiar with this kind of work and that are already in this world, and so hopefully it'll provide a better, you know, communication, but better, but the incentives will be better aligned than some of the other attempts in the past.

Yeah, Specifically, about, you know, how they, how they would prefer to be funded. And I, and the, the overwhelming response that I got, it wasn't unanimous, like no things are in this community, but, you know, most people did prefer to have kind of a steady stream of modest income that was predictable, kind of, you know, plebs donating fifty dollars a month, in a recurring fashion, rather than maybe, just maybe, getting a two hundred K grant from an exchange, or something. Something along those lines. And so that's really the model that, that we're trying to replicate, for the most part. We will be giving out grants, probably capping them to make sure that, no one person or one project gets like overfunded, and, and we leave anyone else behind. But, I, I just think that, like, again, the, the biggest thing we have to stress is we don't know everything. we want community feedback, we want everyone to kind of voice their opinion, and, you know The, the reason I selected kind of everyone to come on is because I think everyone has, everyone first of all is, is an amazing Bitcoiner, and, I think they'll keep us honest, and we're, we're just absolutely gonna do our best, and like that we can promise you, we can't promise you we're gonna do it perfectly, but we're, we're definitely gonna try, and we're not gonna take a cent while we do it, so I think, yeah, I think those are all important things. So speaking

of the board, let's

So we have, on the board we have Janine, your listener. Has Janine been on the show yet? No, actually, I do need to get her on at some point, yeah. So Janine's a co-host of the Block Digest, one of the longest running Bitcoin shows. I mean, I think that's, it's been around forever, and she has a huge privacy focus, tons of respect for her. She, she has this new, month, month in review Bitcoin privacy, newsletter that's fantastic that everyone should go subscribe

It's gonna be way too, I didn't think she would say yes for sure. Yeah, I can go down the list here, I've,

I've got it in front of me. so are like, James O'Byrne is kind of an amazing Bitcoin core contributor, he just released some awesome work about, I think it was U- was it UTXO or was, it, Matt, I, I heard it on your latest TFC, how, how the block sync was sped up. He did some work on that. No Board and extra shout out to James and anyone who is an actually open source contributor, they've all agreed to like not be funded through the organization. So while we hope to, you know, fund everyone, anyone and everyone, we are trying to avoid conflict of interest, and so that, that means that anyone who, who jumped on board, in a board capacity isn't, isn't not gonna be receiving funding. So there's James, who's our Bitcoin Core kind of person, Lisa Neagut, she's, she's really big at, Blockstream and, she's You know, he's alright. Elena, she's, she's also kind of on the, on the software side. But then we also have, I don't know if some of these people don't love their names going out there, so I'll, I'll try and give their nims. Dread, which, his Twitter tag is Polvotdream. he kind of identifies as a global advocate for Bitcoin Core. He was just down in El Salvador with Jack and Peter, and has been kind of, Beach and figuring out, you know, how we can help replicate that in, in other cities and areas, around the globe. Matt mentioned Janine, who I guess I, I have written down here, like investigative journalist, she's an amazing privacy advocate. Katan, who, Stefan, I'm sure you know a lot about. Well, I know. Yeah. So he's, he's kind of our open source guru, who, he's been helping manage our BTC Pay. He's been, you know, we're trying to implement LNURL Mon has been doing a lot of that work as long as, along with Elaine, so shout out to them. and then myself, who's, you know, probably the least impressive out of everyone. And then last but not least, we've got, we've got like our marketing evil genius. Gotta leave

the shit corner to last. Yeah,

yeah. Udi, Udi. So, you know, he's, he kind of brings a little bit of character to the team and, and, he'll keep us all honest. Yeah, I'm I think Udi should, should take the reins there soon.

He can drive some engagement by, you know, trolling people. Yeah. So in terms of projects, I mean, I guess, m-m, bit more of an open question, what would you guys like to see in the Bitcoin and Lightning and privacy and what, or, or other related technologies? What kinds of things do you want to see come to Bitcoin?

I, I, this is where I think the board's gonna differ all over the place, and that's what's, that's what's beautiful. I also think that the

Donate specifically to the projects you wanna see funded. personally, I really, really, really hate chainalysis. one of the, one of the main reasons I left Visa, is, is kind of the, the corporate lifestyle and the fact that they play really nice with banks and the regulators. you know, Bitcoin is here, it's for everyone, and I'm all about the privacy tech. I, I love the projects that are really promoting that, the projects that allow people to join into this permissionless net, network in a, in a bankless without any like kind of oversight from anyone, and, so I'm gonna be pushing hard on both privacy things, and then I think like, if you, if you kind of have a US-centric, view of things, things get a little skewed, and, and at least, you know, over here, as, as I live in the States right now, at least, I think we all s- some of us suffer from, kind of US-based projects, but I think if you, if you zoom out and try and have a global view, a lot

Further, in, in places overseas, and I think, so far what I've seen from some projects in the space is, is maybe, what I perceive is like overfunding kind of popular projects. And so I really hope that, we can have like a global mindset, really try and cap funding and spread it, you know, wide as opposed to, just a few people at the, at the core who, who maybe we've all heard of, because there are so many people out there doing amazing things, and, I Let someone spend the next few months on, on a project, and, those are the kind of people that, that I hope to push forward. But every single board member, everyone in the community is gonna have a differing opinion, so I'm, I'm curious to hear what Matt says actually.

Yeah, I mean, the cool part of the, about the board is it's a very, a lot of independent thinkers, so I expect a lot of spirited debate going forward. but I mean, I think any of the listeners that know me knows, you know, what I'm President Tech, freedom stuff, you know, all the good shit. Let's, you know, let's, let's, let's help create the world that, you know, we want our children to live in.

So from a privacy perspective then, what, what in- what appeals to you guys is it, as an example, would it be getting more pay join adoption into wallets out there so that you can break the heuristic, or is it, you know, having better or more coin join options? is there anything in particular you guys like or you would wanna

see we need more pay join adoption, of course. I would love to see a wallet that, for instance, has like CoinJoin and Lightning in the same wallet, you know? I would love to see Lightning wallets that are more focused on the, the privacy side. You know, I also, you know, one thing Ben didn't mention that I know he agrees with me on, that I would love to see, is that I would, I would love to see just easier UX and easier accessibility that doesn't sacrifice on the privacy side, right? Like I want, I want, you know and not have to be the most technical person in the world and still do relatively good privacy best practices, right? And I think you see that in some projects that might not advertise themselves as privacy projects, and they're not really focused on it yet, but with a little bit of, you know, a little bit of, of, of focus on, on that aspect and trying to, you know, just iron out the privacy aspects of it a little bit, you can end up in a situation where you have good UX and relatively good privacy, and, and the project that I'm specifically thinking- Thinking of in this case is something like a Moon Wallet, M U U N, which isn't meant to be a privacy wallet at all. It r-right now requires Google services. you know, if you use Calyx, you can use it with MicroG, but like it requires Google services, like no privacy wallet should, you know, have Google services incorporated in it. But the UX is dead, dead simple, and it, it bridges Lightning and on-chain, right? So all these different things, I mean, we have a very open-ended mission. I think the cool Actions all the time, you know, state change, it would be really cool to see a state chain implementation, it would really, be really cool to see a coin join implementation on Liquid, maybe tools that allow you to consolidate UTXOs that are under, that, that a bunch of UTXOs, and consolidate them in some kind of privacy focused way that doesn't completely destroy your privacy and is easy UX. so, you know, I think the cool part about this board, is this board lives and breathes this shit already, right? And we're, we're looking at all You know, we're friendly with the developers and the contributors, and we see where their heads at, and we're-- and we see where that's, that's going, and I think we'll have very good communication between the projects and us and the dones, and as a result, we'll be able to, you know, it just keeps coming back to aligning incentives. I think we'll be able to kind of work off of each other and, and, and maybe it's not just a money thing, maybe it's also, you know, like a feedback kind of loop where people

wanted, yeah, kind of thing. And

Matt, Matt touched on some important things there that I think, kind of help answer your question, Stefan, without, without directly supporting any sort of privacy initiatives, there are so many contributors that are contributing in fashions that, like, i-in an ancillary way, still push forward privacy tech. So maybe you're a Taproot developer, maybe you're a code reviewer, maybe you're a security researcher, or perhaps you're a, a UX designer, on any of these projects. That's one thing that we have left out up until That, kind of falls under Opensats' purview, which is we, we have a broad definition of who is a contributor. I mean, my, my background is product management. I am not a tech guy, by trade. I, I'm not getting deep in the weeds. I'm not the guy who's, who's auditing code when you say, you know, don't trust, verify. I, I'm trusting other people, unfortunately. but, but what I, you know, what I do in, in a day-to-day fashion is wallet, in, in a privacy-focused way, that, that doesn't, you know, sell all of her UTXO data to a third party or, so, so I guess- The, the main point that I'm, I'm trying to stress here is, it's not just core developers that we're funding, it is, designers, it is reviewers, it is researchers, it's really anyone who's contributing to free and open source software and giving their time to improve it in any way, shape or form. And I think that like every single project benefits from a great designer working on Bitcoin, or a great code reviewer reviewing code, or a great, security researcher at the protocol level. Every product, whether you're a second, third, twenty-fifth layer There, you get, you get ancillary benefits from that, and I think that's, that's a niche we wanted to fill as well, which is, you know, we see com- organizations like Brink, they're kind of more focused on developers, Square, I think, has a, has a little bit more of a design focus, HRF is a little more focused on privacy. We, we just wanna make sure if you're a contributor, you're represented. you know, you might not, you might not make a million dollars a month through our platform,

You know, our go- our, our hope is that the community will see that, it will at least try and make it easier with our platform. And, you know, if you, if you're really underfunded because you're just super unpopular, I guess, for some reason, or like, y-you're just name isn't out there, you're doing unsexy work, quote unquote, like code reviewers maybe. you know, ideally the, the board will kind of notice that and we can step in and, and help fund the projects that really are doing work that,

Now we touched on this earlier, but non Bitcoin projects, obviously not shitcoins, but we're talking about, you know, things that enable our sovereignty. Do you want to elaborate a little bit? and maybe this isn't necessarily OpenSats perspective, but your personal perspectives as board members, what kinds of things would you be looking for there from a non Bitcoin perspective?

I mean, so, so from-- I mean, my opinion is, I think it's, I, I thought it was relatively straightforward, but the, you know, the, the ideas like, stuff like encryption, secure hardware There's, there's this guy Bunny Studios, like he's working on, you know, open hardware platform, that, that would allow us to like kind of have the, the advantages of something like a hardware wallet with a secure element, but it'd be open. and that's not a Bitcoin only thing, right? That's not even Bitcoin focused at all. Tor, a Tor replacement, you know, Tor I think is, a great project and something we rely on heavily. It'd be nice if we had some alternatives to it. Secure messaging, people Sending you the Bitcoin address. I'm gonna send you a Lightning invoice, how am I sending you a Lightning invoice? So I think all those are pretty obvious, I think, but it could go broader than that too, right? I think, you know, distributed social media, you know, what, then maybe the next Mastodon or something, that, that has better trust aspects to it. you know, we have Fiat Jaff, who's a Bitcoin developer, working on something called Nostr. I probably pronounced it incorrectly,

but that, that's, I think for the projects that are listed, like in our so-called marketplace, this idea where you can earmark, we're gonna be more loose about it. You know, as long as they're not scams, and they're generally in the good direction, we'll list them, and if you wanna donate to them, there'll be a very good transparent description of, of what you're donating to. then so be it, you know, you're, you're a bitcoiner, you should, you should be able to earmark where you wanna earmark. On the general fund,

Critical, I think, you know, pure, pure Bitcoin projects are obviously gonna have the, the upper hand in those kind of allocation discussions, just naturally because we're all Bitcoiners. And I think that as a board member myself, I think there's gonna be a, there's gonna, there's gonna have to be like a, a pretty good justification of why we're dona-- you know, why we're giving a, especially if it's a larger grant, why we're giving a larger grant out of the general fund to maybe a, a tertiary project, you know, we're gonna The biggest check here is that we should be as transparent as possible, and that way, you know, if we do act in bad faith, the community can just fucking shut us down and just stop donating. And I, I, so I think ultimately the single most important thing we can do here is, is be as transparent as possible.

Yeah, Matt, Matt listed a ton of things there, and honestly, he's way more plugged into the, the privacy and kind of open source community than I am. And, you know, another thing that comes to mind is like, that, that I really Journalism, I think, we've started to see even like central banks redacting like comments and, and adding things in after speeches, that, it's just, it's just getting ridiculous out here. And so anything that's free and open source and supports the world, I think, I think one other thing we're gonna focus on is, is people that kind of, you know, give back, learning, com-mu- like education materials to the community. That, that is, it takes a lot of time and effort and, and work, like, shit Tutorials, like these are things that benefit the community as well, and, and while they might not be deep in the weeds coding, honestly, deep in the weed coders don't help me that much. Like, what helps me is, is someone who comes in and shows me how to set up a node or like shows me how to work on layer two, because, you know, most people, aren't gonna be contributors to Bitcoin Core at the end of the day. They're, they're trying to do their part, they're trying to be, you know, privacy oriented and focused,

Kind of Google, operating system, but that stuff's hard. And so, I think each and every board member, brings a kind of unique perspective into the, the different kind of, ancillary Bitcoin technologies that they wanna see supported. And the best thing is, is like, we have nine board members, like, none of us are gonna capture, we're, we're not gonna capture the full market of products out there. So the best thing you can do is if you are working on something that's awesome, and, and again, it has to be free and

And, and you think it kind of fits into the mission, come, come like apply, and I think you'll be surprised that, as long as you-- as long as you're helping the world, as long as your software or whatever you're providing is free and open source, y-you'll be, you'll be welcomed with support. Awesome.

Well, yeah, look, that sounds great. I'm encouraging listeners to sign up as a contributor, and I think the key one here is, as, as you guys were saying earlier, is to have people

You know, some fiat every month, and, that's the way this thing can build up. So, for listeners who wanna find you guys online, where can they, sign up and become a contributor?

Right now, our, our like kind of pre-launch website is live, it's opensats dot org. If you screw up and, do opensats dot com, anything like that, it'll all get redirected. I, I snagged all the domains. so opensats dot org is where we are right now. Right now, the Open for anyone to come check us out, it's kind of a, a simple landing page, but we're really pushing for anyone working on projects, any contributors, to come and, fill out kind of an application to pre, pre-listed. And, in the background, again, Castle Nine is working, double time to actually get our, our donation platform live. so i-ideally, our goal is to have something live before Bitcoin 21. We, you know, we may or may not hit that deadline, but very, very soon,

Where you can donate with your, you know, debit or credit cards or via BTC Pay server with Bitcoin or Lightning, that'll all be live, very soon, and, yeah, it's, it's still gonna be opensats dot org, but again, we're gonna, we're, we're welcoming contributors right now to, to list their projects to be pre-listed and kind of vetted, and, donors can, can kinda come there and, and check out the board, check out the early sponsors, and if you have any interest in giving back, whether

Any, any way you wanna give back, some people have reached out and just wanna, wanna give some Bitcoin, right now there's, there's no, no way to directly donate yet, just because we're still working on automating all the backend accounting things, but if you reach out directly at donate at opensats dot org, or contact at opensats dot org, or, I mean, shit, my, my email is ben at opensats dot org, feel, feel free to hit me up and, you know, we'll, we'll make something work.

You know, either contribute fiat or if they are a, you know, person con- contributing on an actual project or they're coding or doing some other contribution, they can perhaps reach out there if they wanna get to be supported. I plan to sign up as well as a, you know, as a pleb supporting. so yeah, I, I, I like the idea and, wish you guys all the best with it and thanks for joining me on the show today. Hey, we appreciate it. Thanks, Stefan, appreciate you. So please do consider supporting Opensats or any

That you are passionate about. Get the show notes for my show at stephanolivera dot com slash two seven eight. As always, if you're enjoying the show, make sure you leave me five stars and a review, that helps new people find me also. Thanks, and I will see you guys in the citadels.