Roasbeef Bitcoin & Lightning For a Billion Users

Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, show about Bitcoin. Today for episode 289, we're talking about this idea of taking Bitcoin and Lightning Network to a billion users, and Roasbeef, Laolu Osuntokun, the CTO of Lightning Labs, re-joins me on the show to talk about this and updates on where the Lightning Network is today, what's going on with Lightning Labs and LND, and of course How to Take Bitcoin and Lightning to a Billion Users. So with Taproot coming in, we talk a little bit about the implications of this, as well as potential future upgrades such as any prevout, which will enable L2, enabling a much more advanced version of the Lightning Network, and how would it work if normally we're thinking of channels as a two of two situation? Well, what does that look like in a multi-party channel situation? This show brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan is the best way to accumulate Bitcoin with automatic recurring buys and instant Buys. Swan offer a really fast and cheap setup so you can automate your stacking plan. If you've heard my recent episode with Huss, you know the importance of automating your DCA. I like Swan's focus on education and content because the more you know, the more you buy, and Swan are also Bitcoin only, so there's no confusion with altcoins. This is the best place to send your pre-coiner and new coiner friends. Also, if you're planning to buy more than a hundred thousand dollars of Bitcoin over the next year, Swan private team is there to help you. They are Internationally, high net worth, corporates, business customers, Swan Private provides additional one on one guidance. You get a dedicated Bitcoin expert who's available for one on one calls. So go to swanbitcoin dot com slash levera to set up your stacking plan or swanbitcoin dot com slash private to start and sign up with Swan Private. Lend at Hoddle Hoddle is a peer to peer Bitcoin backed lending platform so you can lend stablecoins or borrow against your Bitcoin globally and anonymously. There's no KYC. So if you've got stablecoins like, USDT You can lend that out on Lend at HodlHodl and earn an average of twenty five percent APR. On the other hand, if you have bitcoins and you need some fiat liquidity, well, now you can borrow against your bitcoins, and, you know, there's no rehypothecation. You still hold one key in the two of three multisig. HodlHodl doesn't hold your funds. So, Lend at HodlHodl allows peer to peer lending and borrowing directly between users. With this platform, you set your own terms and you put up offers depending on

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What's up? What's up? It's good, it's good to be back. It's, it's been a while.

Yeah, man. There has been so much going on in the Lightning world. We are seeing an entire nation state that may be coming onto the Lightning network. I'm sure that must be very gratifying. I mean, I think of you and, you know, my friends, Rusty and Christian Decker. You guys are some of the architects of this thing, so it must be very gratifying for you to see

I remember like, you know, I was at like the Miami conference and like I was talking to people that were like, "Okay, like, you, you make sure you stick around to the end, you have a really cool, you know, first try, yada, yada." I was like, "Okay, well, let's, let's see what it actually is." And then I was like back in like my hotel room and I saw it like on

the live stream and I was like, "Oh, this is for real, like what?" And then, you know, I, I Bald, like, are we gonna drop it, things like that. But definitely like a massive opportunity. So, you know, couldn't be more excited about this and just generally for, you know, people to start using Bitcoin, you know, more and more around the world, get some more and more users basically, and like, you know, make sure this like a real thing, actually happening out there, so yeah, so it's super dope, I think.

Yeah, this is so cool. And we, you know, we have maybe, an, an enthusiast Lightning

Half million Salvadorans who are gonna be using the Lightning Network. Now, in fairness, it's gonna start small, it might only be, yeah, twenty-five percent of them, and okay, fine, many of them might be using the custodial Trivio wallet, but it's a start, and they're gonna, they're gonna get into it, and hopefully then over time, they will come down their own rabbit hole journey and learn about Bitcoin and the Lightning Network, and, you know, I look, in fairness, for many of them, they'll just use the app and that's Wow, what, how, you know, what's it gonna look like when we have this many more people coming into the Bitcoin and the Lightning network?

No, definitely, yeah, 'cause I, you know, I think what you're saying is while, like, you know, people probably just use the app initially, but I think, like, you know, at least for me, like, my first Bitcoin wallet was Coinbase. I didn't know anything, you know, I had my, my, my coins there, like, I kind of like learned over time. So, you know, I, Out there, I think the big thing is obviously, okay, well, you know, now people have like a choice, which obviously the bigger thing, where, you know, people haven't really had that, you know, choice as far as their money, the monetary system before. So I think that's gonna be really, a really big deal. But, you know, but I guess, you know, as far as like the tooling, so one thing I think I was thinking about is, okay, well, you know, obviously like all, you know, our stuff typically is in the English language

I think that's another cool thing because, like, you know, there's a pretty like large developer community already in, you know, Latin America and South America. You have like the RSK people, Moon, Ripio, a bunch of other developers that are working there as well, too. So, you know, so it's not as if, like, you know, we need to go in there and like, you know, educate them and show what's up, you know, they have like a pretty large community already that's there, and I'm sure they're really excited about this opportunity

on

And things like that as well, too. So I think one of the really interesting parts about this is that, okay, look, you know, now like you, the big thing obviously with Lightning, like, can you actually make come, come, come, like a circular economy actually happen, right? Because if that's the case, then you basically never need to go back to the main chain. I'm getting paid, you know, in Bitcoin over Lightning, I'm getting my paycheck, I'm like, you know, tipping other people, I'm actually, you know, buying, you know, things Actually, kind of like, you know, is more and more additive to basically what's going on there. The other thing there is too, like, you can actually, you know, reuse the capital, right? For example, like, you know, I was like looking at my stats, like, my note today, I think I have like, you know, point two five, you know, BTC, twenty-five million satoshis on my note itself, and then, like, I, I look over the past six months, and I've done, you

know, like over four You know, or like, you know, millions of dollars of revenue or capacity in there, you can potentially do a lot more because you basically get that reuse. Now, I think it's all about that reuse basically, and this is what people, you know, kind of like miss at times, and there's the whole like energy flood thing, blah, blah, blah, but it's kind of like, okay, well, you know, those like ten thousand transactions I did over the past few months, that never hit the chain, and that was basically just like my computer, you know

A little bit similar. I was actually like on vacation when all the news dropped, so I was like kind of disconnected, kind of, you know, talking to people and losing message to him, he's like, "Yo, like, I don't even have vacation, but like, this just happened, blah, blah, blah." I was like, "Okay, okay, alright, you're working on it, working on it." But,

no, definitely should be talking about it all. That's cool. And, yeah, it's a great point there around the TVL stat that really thing, as more and more people come into the Lightning Network, now you can stay in Lightning and you don't have to go to chain. And so it's, it's all about, and I think that's where maybe the Lightning skeptics don't quite see eye to eye with, say, the views that you and I have, because they are thinking, "Oh, look, every time someone has to pay me, they have to open a channel to me." But it's like, no, think of it more like, once you have set up your node and you've got the channels going, you

And I think the other thing with the TDL stuff is that, like, you know, many times it's like double and even triple count, right? Because, like, you know, the things like this protocols kind of like have like rehypothecation built in directly into what's happening, right? So, you know, I lock up this thing, I got a token for that, I lock that up, I get a token, right? So, like, you know, I can just like thread through my money ten or five or ten times and like really inflate myself up. Like in this Moon and everything else as well, like, you know, those people aren't really reflected there. But it's kind of the thing where it's like, you know, at the end of the day, like, you know, my mind, like, even like the actual public network doesn't even really need to be that big, because at the same time, what's really important is basically like, you know, can you ride around failures basically? And then also, is there a single point of failure or not, right? Anything else is like, okay, well, you know, the, the, the Or if you wanted to kind of like, you know, even draw all the edges, you know, in the graph, it's one of the things where it's like, okay, you're rendering might slow down, you know, just because there's just so many other connections there, right? So, so I mean, I think people, you definitely can't underestimate like the power of the network effect itself, and, you know, every single node coming on, basically, you know, is more and more additive, and you're kind of like, adds

like, you know, you know, They're coming online with Lightning soon. I know OKCoin have it, I think OKX have it, some of the smaller exchanges, CoinCorner have it, even like mining, one of the mining pools, I think was it NiceHash, who are offering mining payouts on Lightning. Oh,

yeah, yeah, NiceHash has it, I think maybe, I've been seeing like Slash ask some questions on like the, the Slack, I think maybe they're looking to add it as well too. but you know, I think it's kind of the thing where like, you know And then maybe they're kind of like, have other parties as well, too. So it's also become a seemingly thing where, okay, like when we're both ready, it'll just kind of like happen, and that's what happened basically. Like for example, with OK Coin, like, you know, we were on like the Telegram talking to them a little bit, like, okay, like we're going live in two weeks, and they're like, oh, okay, that's cool. So I think it's also kind of like validating that people can like, you can go from zero to one naysayers can say it's not happening, but like my node, you know, is routing, you know, like multiple BTC, you know, every like month or two, so it's definitely happening. It's one of the things where it's like, you know, because there isn't like a global, you know, log of everything happening, you basically need to be tapped into in order to actually see what's going on, which is fine, because it's kind of okay, well, you, you know, there's no shortcuts basically, right? and

obviously, Then we have like, you know, potentially now some, you know, pretty significant, like, on the ground, you know, adoption for these people as well, too. but, you know, it's always a thing where it's like, you know, the work, stuff is never done. People always say, "Okay, is it still in beta?" Blah, blah, it's like, I mean, like, you know, except for example, like, you know, even Bitcoin D itself, up until like a year or so, had the beta tag, code on Particular wallets have gotten a lot better over the past year or two, you know, because like, you know, obviously there are kind of like a, you know, a number of like, they're kind of like onboarding UX challenges, but I think, you know, now the current iteration of the wallets, like, it's, it's pretty good. Like, you know, things like Phoenix, Breeze, Moon, these other ones as well, they kind of like abstract things away and then also like start to like even, you know, modify the protocol in slight ways

to basically make I'm saying, hey, this is how we do this and this and this. It's kind of okay, well, you know, we'll, we'll do the base stuff. You let, let us know what you need, you do over there, you know, you basically like, kind of like, you know, go towards your niche and your user base, and that's just kind of like, you know, what we're seeing here, in terms of all the innovation going on, which is super exciting.

Yeah, that's awesome. So just for listeners who might be trying to catch Have other wallets that allow, that you might be using to connect back with your own home node or to a VPS node or some node proper, like computer that you've got set up, and that's where you might be using, say, the likes of Zeus or Zap or other, wallets. And then what we're talking about now is also that the network is growing and it's becoming, you know, we're seeing more and more volume, but it's just not that there's any top-down statistics to show, oh, this is how many Bitcoin payments went across the Lightning Network, because that exist, so it kind of has to be inferred out by either knowing people in the space or looking at maybe some of the data from, say, say the likes of a company like Bitrefill, where you can buy vouchers using the Lightning Network, or companies like Bit, Bitfinex, who are one of the big exchanges who support Lightning. So that's kind of where we're seeing, a lot of this growth happen, right?

No, definitely, definitely. And like, you know, we're also, we're also, you know, So those, those things are all definitely going up. And I, I think, because I think now it's also driven by people like, you know, coming in to like do new, you know, novel activity, for example, like the podcasting, where you're getting tipped on it, or they're doing, you know, they're, they're buying like things like gift cards as well too, and also like you're not with other new applications popping up, you know, on, on the side. I think people are also starting to see, okay, well, Just, just so you can actually, you know, be able to retract, if things are being disrupted, on chain for whatever reason.

Yeah, that's an interesting point around how the recent hash rate shifts can impact people who are using Lightning, because as, you know, you know, but just for listeners, a part of our security model when we're using Lightning is that we need to be able to, you know, be able to go back to chain if we need to, and I guess that's kind of getting into maybe the more adversarial aspects of it and I wonder if you've got any maybe opening thoughts there on how Lightning Network looks when we are operating in, say, a higher fee Bitcoin on-chain environment, i.e. let's say the, the fee for, you know, going on-chain might be twenty dollars or thirty dollars per time, per chain usage, what does that look like for Lightning users?

yeah, super good question. So, you know, at that point, you can say like the individuals that kind of like, you know, opened up channels initially kind of like have like, you can say like kind of like prime real Another interesting effect there would be kind of like, you know, the effect of like off-chain fees relative to on-chain fees, right? 'Cause you can say, okay, well, in a given moment, maybe the on-chain fees should basically serve as a ceiling, but those go up as well, too. Maybe occasionally, maybe like lightning fees go up as well, because now it's kind of like, something that's, you know, a little more like in higher demand there. I think another important thing, something that, you know, we've been working on, you know, In the recent emergence of LND, we enabled something called anchor channels, which basically, you know, by default, which basically allows you, you know, to kind of like, you know, bump your fee, you know, after the fact, right? Because the, the things otherwise, before you kind of like have to like guess what the fee would be. So it's like, you know, the fees right now for next block is like, you know, twenty satoshi, I basically would say, okay, I don't wanna use that, right? But then if I go I think, you know, even explorers now basically show kind of like what the like, aggregate fee will be basically. So I have like three transactions, they're each five satoshi, but I mean the aggregate fee is like two satoshi, right? So it's definitely an important thing going forward. and I think we're also working a number of things on LND, for example, like, you know, there's something called like a, you know, probably familiar with like lightning, it's kind of like a CLTV delay basically for like multi-hop payments, right As well, too. I think one of the really important thing, you know, as you can say, like, maybe the change become more, more gesture change fees going up, things like, you know, like batch channel openings, basically the ability to open, you know, n channels in single transaction, that's super important because that basically saves you, you know, a lot of money when you're actually, you know, a transaction on chain, because rather than like doing, you know, n transactions, basically you do one. I think other things, you know, definitely something that, like,

We probably can't have like a root UTXO for talking about like a billion, you know, plus user base, right? So how do we kind of, you know, let a thousand people go into one UTXO? You know, a hundred thousand people go into one UTXO, right? So I think it's a thing where, like, you know, this has always been possible, you know, in theory, but I think, you know, kind of like as we were working on things like pool, I started to kind of, you know, realize some of the kind Time, you know, if we really, really need to, let's say we wanna like go to like the subnet in Los Angeles, we can basically route, you know, across that. This is kind of like a more similar to how like the internet works, where obviously, you know, you and I are, let's say we're using something like Comcast, like an ISP in the internet, you know, we can kind of like route within their network, but we need to go to, you know, something like AT&T, we kind of like, you know, go through the public

internet, Payments either from use case perspective or even geographically, you save a lot because then at that point, you basically need to only do routing if you need to kind of go across some other locale basically. And the other cool thing about that is then like, you know, we can then have like the payments within like a particular kind of sub-sub locale or like subnet just ha-just having a little more seamlessly. And then maybe there even the possibility of kind of like doing offline payments within that locale as well too. So it definitely will be like a really big thing going forward to basically, you know, make sure

Break some of the, those aspects down. I think the important part is, the, I think probably the key part is the constraint, as you were saying, literally, if, you know, just for listeners who aren't familiar, there's literally, if, if, if you will, an upper bound on how many people can hold a coin, UTXO, unspent transaction output. And so what you're talking about there is how do we find ways to sort of batch that? Now, I guess one way is even literally just more like a lightning bank, right? So even About how, just as an example, they had the Bitcoin Beach wallet, and they've got thousands of users there. I think he put some stats out the other day saying he had done seven thousand transactions, of which only fourteen had to actually go on chain. So that's one way, but obviously that's custodial. So what I think what you're talking about here is more like, how would we en-enable it in a way that's- You know, a little bit more closer to the non-custodial side, right? so could you, could you explain a little bit around, I guess maybe like what that UTXO Constraint is and how we would, you know, what, what, what's the technology that we would need to go above and beyond where we are now?

Sure, no, definitely, definitely. Oh, yeah, you know, I definitely think kind of like the whole like, you know, community bank stuff like Bitcoin Beach is pretty interesting 'cause, like, you know, I feel like, you know, the end of the day, it's kind of like a federated coin base type of thing, right? Okay, well, you know, people aren't really kind of like in more directly

It's like in like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, you know, like, you know, Tadge, you know, Dryder kind of like had this analogy called kind of like the bathtub, right? Kind of the Bitcoin bathtub. On one side, basically like the box is like, you know, super tiny and like, you know, only a few individuals, you know, can actually validate things. On the other side, like the box is like super large, but then at the same time, because they're so big, people can't really, really do the validation there, right Right? But then at the same time as well, too, if you look at kind of like the, you know, marginal addition of any individual on like the UTXU- UTXO set database itself starts to get very, very large, like, you know, gigabytes, terabytes even as well, too. So there's a kind of like a constraint where, like, you know, thing, if things get too big, it's, it can be a case that like either, you know, you're like, you basically need to like wait in line for two years to join Bitcoin, Right? So I can, vanilla, you know, things like, right now we basically have like two of us, right? So it's a two of two, we can move money back and forth, right? So then you say, okay, well, what if it was a three of three, right? Okay, now at that point, like, you know, the three of us can do payments by just like updating our balances, like I propose a state, the three of us sign it, then go things like that, right? But then once you, once you start to go in that direction, Like, you know, complexity as far as like messages being pa-passed back and forth as well, too. So then, you know, people in the past, things like channel factors or channel factors, okay, well, you know, what if we have kind of like a root multisig that everyone in the root multisig, but at the same time, we kind of like have like a tree structure, right? So first we have like the, the three of three, then we break that up into basically the combinations of every single two of two amongst, amongst ourselves, right? Okay, that's a analyze that, you know, to basically more and more participants. So, so one thing is that like, so the reason why people are really excited about things like L2 is that it kind of like makes certain parts of this things a little bit easier, right? Because otherwise, like, with revocation model, if you wanna like, you know, do revocation of like ten people, there's some questions around the kind of like, okay, well, you know, if someone breaches, who gets the money? But then also kind of like, you know, what if I breach,

I can't, if I, if I do, I get punished. We basically say, okay, well, you know, the, the, the highest sequence number is basically the one that's most valid. This is a little bit easier because now the Timelords can basically, you know, kind of like have the state and move forward. And, you know, it's also a little bit, more, simple because you're kind of like having symmetric state as well, too. There's no longer a version of the transaction for every single participant, which makes things a little bit easier Maybe there's no scale, but then you can say, okay, well, maybe we'll have like a thousand person per channel, right? and then at that point, we can kind of, you know, have and basically, you know, kind of like shard that out, quote unquote basically to have, like, you know, a series of these and then actually like have payments, you know, work between them, but then also, within the channels as well, too. These, these are things I've been talking about in the wild. I think Z has an idea, he You know, if you're able to make this stuff work out, you can then, then also improve the UX a lot more, right? Because now at this point, it's like, okay, well, you know, it's, it's, it's like, you know, the thing is like, if, if you were standing next to me, I'd give you a ten dollar bill, I know you're gonna get it, right? I don't have to worry about, you know, it falling, you know, along the way, right? But you can say, okay, well,

Then go and then route it elsewhere. I think it's then it will start to resemble basically like how the internet works today, as far like you kind of like have these autonomous systems, you know, they, they kind of like, you know, have ISPs within them, they have like providers, you know, stuff like that, and then you kind of like have these exchange points, and that exchange point, you know, in the setting of Lightning is basically these public routing channels.

Yeah. Okay. So it's, I guess it, thinking about Lightning as it exists today, part of how it works is, you know, as an example, if I set the channel up with you, we trade each other back and forward the pre-signed states, and then if, if, if, if we ever need to go to chain unilaterally, either side of us can publish that to the blockchain, to Bitcoin, and, yeah, blah, blah, blah, right? But then what you're talking about is how do we get that beyond just two of two, two people?

People or a hundred or a thousand people, and, and, and then so as you were saying, the complexity associated with that, given the current technology we have, is very difficult, but hopefully when, once we get things like any prevout and, potentially, is it CTV as well, com- check, check template verify, where, they, that can enable this kind of thing. So I guess maybe- Yeah, and so for listeners as well, check out episode two hundred with Christian Decker, we went into detail on any prevout and what that kind of enables in the L2 space, but from Yeah, so from, your perspective then, what, what are the logical next upgrades to Bitcoin that would enable this kind of future? Like, are you looking at L- any pre-vote and CTV or what's, what are you, what are you looking at?

good question, good question. I mean, so I, I guess like, you know, I feel like at times people like, get into like some weird discourse as far as like, what's next? This is the next thing we're gonna do this. But like, you know, I, I like Maybe this really like allow us like really achieve what we want to, you know, do overall, right? So I think there's this concept like, kind of like, you know, which I like try to use as kind of like an example is like something that like, you know, Jeremy Rubin, you know, Antoine and Glauber and other people were kind of like concept like basically like payment pools, right? So like, you know, rather than like having like one individual or two individuals kind of like in a channel, let's try to basically have a set of individuals, right But how do I make sure I kind of like have a unilateral withdrawal? And that's also like a big thing with Lightning is, okay, well, at any point I wanna, I can always just force close, boom, everything's fine, take my money. So there's kind of like some challenges around like how do we, you know, achieve things like that. So, you know, I definitely, you know, obviously, no input, you know, amazing. I remember like I wrote like a very early version of it, like twenty fifteen or so, because, because I think the one thing is But then like things like, you know, I want to say, okay, well, you know, let me just kind of like categorize this thing where it's okay, the three of us, and then no matter what happened before, I can like kind of retain that signature. So once again, it kind of like, you know, helps to reduce kind of like complexity and then also kind of like, you know, you know, like space footprint and things like that in, in terms of getting the protocols, working. So something like CTV is also really important because, for example Mitigates to every single possible state, and then once you know that's in the chain, that lets you basically move forward, you know, with everything else. So, so I basically like have like one transaction on chain, and I know that eventually these three hundred channels will open, you know, eventually, right? And the cool thing about that too is that, like, you know, once, once that transaction post on chain, you can basically start to use those other channels like off chain immediately, right? Because even though they don't have direct confirmation themselves, it's kind of a thing where it Texting on Stack, kind of like the ability to, like, you know, verify arbitrary signature message pair, which sounds like very simple and obviously something that we do already, like, you know, we've done a bunch of work, you know, people around like optimized signatures, new approach, things like that as well too. But things like that would let you do really cool things. For example, like one thing I've been turning around with is, okay,

you know, it's kind of like a concept, I guess, jump around a little bit, kind of like That's still very slow, very expensive, right? So what if it's possible for me to basically join a channel off-chain, right? And, and the reason why this is kind of challenging is, okay, like, so imagine a little bit earlier, let's say like, you know, we have that three of three, you know, multisig between you, me, and, you know, someone else like your friend, right? Let's say we, we want to like, you know, have Bob join the channel. So the thing is, you know, Bob It's probably okay in many cases, you know, depending on the trust model. Once again, like, you know, there's definitely like a great for, you know, you know, new and advanced users as well too. But, you know, it's kind of things like, you know, ideally we can basically make that like work in a more direct setting. So one thing I'm turning around with is basically,

you know, what, what if I have like, you know, kind of like, like some coins on chain, right? Like the, these are coins I'm Or even though we've done notarization on chain, he basically has a good enough claim on that on-chain output basically, and then maybe we'll be comfortable to using this output, you know, off-chain, then we go from there as well too. And, you know, it seems like in my mind, the things you need to do that are kind of like, you know, more, you know, kind of like, you can say, "Coming in that allow kind of like partial, you know, partial application, right?" So, so, Everyone else, right? So all of a sudden now, you, I can, you can basically give me, you know, we do this like protocol off-chain, I get kind of like a signature over this message basically, and the contract can then parse that message and then do things like that. And I think it's, you know, it's definitely super powerful. So I am as view is, this is like one of the things that, like, I think, you know, we really need in Bitcoin to basically, you know, do more advanced smart contract, contract functionality. And,

you Okay, channels opening, it's closing, force close, CSV, things like that as well too. This would let you kind of like, you know, encode that state machine, you know, in the, in the Bitcoin script itself and like have that just run even non-interactively, right? So like in the future, let's, let's like, you know, once again, like another toy example, let's say I have like a, like a very like basic covenant, basically it takes the public key and a hash and then goes to another state, right? And in that you know, not interactively themselves, right? and so I, I think some people, you know, get worried about stuff like this, okay, is it too much? Blah, blah, blah. Like, I guess my mind, because you can always kind of like, you know, draw like the actual like finite state machine of the thing itself, it's a lot less scary than something like another chains. And so one of the issues with other chains is like, you know, you kind of like have like basically global state, but then you also have like a, a state Right? You know, but, but in this case, you know, be-because I, I know exactly what the contract can do, it's a lot more understandable, you know, even though it's, you know, a lot more constrained, it's still, I think, is immensely powerful, basically. I think, I think it's almost like, you know, just what I'm thinking kind of like really like a prerequisite for us to kind of, you know, create these more, kind of like elaborate, you know, kind of like, you know, like ownership structures Help me get out, like, you know, we definitely wanna avoid that stuff. We don't want, you know, you know, just people like losing money left and right. So, you know, it, it may take some time to kind of like, you know, get towards that golden design, but I think, you know, definitely we shouldn't, try to like do everything all at once basically and postpone these things. Like, once again, I feel like, you know, not that there's like time pressure, but it's kind of the thing where it's Give us time to basically, like, you know, do a lot of the background research, but at the same time, you know, kind of like empower, you know, developers to basically make more elaborate things on chain, basically. And then from there on, once again, we have this kind of like, you know, very it-it-iterative evolutionary process where people just kind of like do their own things. And this whole like permission, permission, permissionless vision thing, where like, you know, someone's probably gonna come up with something that you had no idea was even possible. They're like Like imagination, basically, right? as long as you have like the proper tooling, you have some imagination there, there's a lot of cool things you can start to build.

Yeah, that's really fascinating, as an answer there. So basically, in response to this idea of what's next, it's more like, it's more open-minded, if I had to, interpret what you're saying, it's more like, hey, if the net, we're gonna create this stuff and see what people are using, see what research comes out of it. And so

I

Then we could upgrade the network to the, quote unquote, L2 Lightning Network, which is like the upgraded form, and that would have all sorts of improvements and implications, like backups would be easier and cheaper to do. It would, enable, this, you know, starting this multi-party channel approach. But at the end of the day, it's still just gonna be, you know, you, you develop something and see how people are using it, and as that grows, then you build further into that. And then later, once you get a new capability, let's say in Well then maybe that enables another whole aspect of, say, batch channels or non-interactive channels, right? and so I guess bringing it back to that, I guess the fundamental problem here we're talking about is that in each block On average, it might be three thousand transactions in a Bitcoin block that happens every ten minutes. And so if somebody has to try and shoot to get into that block, well, that's-- and obviously there is a block space market, so you pay more fee, you get, you're more likely to get confirmed faster. But in the Lightning context, it's just more like you wanna make sure that, let's say, you're not getting cheated out of your money or you at least can claim back, or let's say, maybe a more likely scenario is you've got some money in a, in, It back into your, you know, your custody and/or, so, yeah, so bring it back to the, the root UTXO tree unrolling. Maybe if you could just elaborate a little bit there. Like the idea is that, you know, there might be this multi-party construct going on, and we might, let's say we've got any prevout and we've got L2 and we have this kind of multi-party construct going and it's about each individual being able to claim their aspects out if they need to or spend it out If they need to unilaterally without first asking the permission from everyone else in their little channel group or I don't know the word, channel factory or whatever term we're going to use for that. So then it's a question of could they still do it even under adversarial conditions? You know, could they still do it if, the fee market was-- if the block space, yeah, if fees are getting higher, or could they still do it if, you know, you know, because with Lightning there's still security things we have to think about, an example might be griefing, right? So if somebody has tried to channel jam and grief you, what, what does it look like then in a multi-party context, right?

Exactly. Yeah. I mean, yes So, so I, I think, I think things like that, like, okay, you know, we recognize this thing is, is just good in terms of like scaling Bitcoin up, you know, making it have more users as well too. Like, what do we need in order to like actually achieve that stuff, right? And I, I think the other thing, like, you know, the things that you mentioned, you know, things like, you know, CTV and so forth, we're all also kind of like, you know, make it easier to actually even just hold Bitcoin generally Of the system, I, I feel like, you know, those can be kind of like, you know, things developers can basically rally behind and say, okay, well, you know, these are the things we really care about, let's move forward, like, you know, what do we need, in order to basically allow these things to move forward, you know, at, at, at, at a proper pace, but at the same time, you know, doing so

in, in, in a, in a, you know, kind of more careful manner, right? And I think, you know, he did it, but I think the script that he did to do this was like over like one point three kilobytes, right? So, you know, once again, like something, you know, super simple like multiplication, but obviously that's just like, like a disabled opcode, right? And one of the things where like Satoshi was like, okay, well, I don't really know how this other stuff works, let me just like, you know, clamp this down. Probably a good decision back then, because obviously we know way more than we did,

now

thing, and even maybe do something like that would, you know, really increase the possibilities of what's happening there. So I, I guess I'm kind of like, you know, more in like the, I guess like progressive camp of like Bitcoin development. I don't like things like, you know, crazy ossification, things like that as well too, just because I just know, I've seen like how quickly spaces evolve basically, and I think it's also a thing where, like, you know, if we're gonna like actually allow Bitcoin to continue to grow and like really, you know, swing of, you know, making more kind of like targeted, direct changes after the twenty seventeen sub segment, blah, blah, so, so, so I think the other cool thing right now is like, you know, one thing that I really like with way like ST, like the speedy, trial up rules work is that, okay, like now at this point, we know that, like, you know, assuming things go well basically, we can basically start to use Taproot, in November, October. So I, I think this is really big for companies, for example,

Asked why, it was like, "Oh, it's another parameter, you know, more, more problems, more, more, more parameters, more problems, everything." But then I was like, "Okay, no, this is actually really ingenious." definitely credit to Russell O'Connor and all the others that basically worked on this thing going forward. So, you know, I'm hopeful that this thing will work out basically, and people can kind of see it as a thing going forward. You know, we can basically do this thing. Obviously, the UASF stuff is always in kind of like the

Hold it out and locked and loaded, you know, be scaring people, say, "Okay, it's a concealed carry," so it's all about deterrence basically. So I think I kind of like lack these dynamics. We basically have like, you know, something to basically can we reject it can it happen faster or not? If not, there's kind of deterrence. So I think we're kind of like, you know, feeling out exactly how these things happening in practice. So I think, you know, sometimes people wanna kind of like have like the perfect way to do it. I don But that's okay as well too, as long as basically, like, you know, meets the goal and basically move things forward. Maybe, you know, you wanted this or that, you wanted, like, you know, a different representation or whatever else. Those are kind of like triple parameters. I think, you know, we need to like make sure we're looking at kind of like the big goal basically and like why we're all here in the first place, and not get caught up in, you know, these kind of like, you know, this or that type of things, which obviously

Maybe sometime next year, something like that, and see how these, these can go forward. but, but yeah, 'cause I remember like, you know, back in the day, like when I, you know, started joining, like we kind of like had a software every six or so months. I'm not saying like we need something like that itself, but I think just even like, you know, the notion in like the investors' mind, particularly like the new people, okay, well, the thing can evolve and move forward. That, that's a pretty powerful thing. But Can we start to kind of, you know, encompass more and more users basically, and then once again, like uploading those like very base principles, you know, that we know, you know, should not change basically, and they kind of underlie, you know, what people feel, feel is kind of the value of this itself? Because I think we're definitely seeing people wake up more and more, 'cause I think it's kind of a thing where it's like, you know, I feel like, there's something that happened to me as well, too. Remember, like I heard about Busy and, you know, so I think it's definitely interesting to see all these kind of like, you know, like old heads, like the OG investors, blah, blah, blah, change their mind, which is obviously like a very powerful thing and something that any, you know, human being needs to be able to do to kind of like, you know, not hold their principles too tightly to basically, you know, kind of like have new information, update their mind, "Wow, I wasn't seeing all this coming, I'm okay, this is really good."

so, you know, You know, people in like, you know, offices of power, politicians talking about it, like they're kind of like actually like, can they like direct change? So I'm definitely, you know, really excited to see what's going, going on in Salvador there. And one thing, yeah, I thought was really cool, it just seemed like they have, like, you know, more so, or more kind of like, you know, tech-technologically literate, literate kind of politician, just kind of like, you know, you know, like base in terms of their government Things like that, I'm like, can Biden even make a PowerPoint?

Yeah, even mentioning the word Lightning Network. Yeah, yeah. So

I don't know, I, I, I feel like that just like really just charges me up. I was like, damn, like this dude gets it, this can really be really big for them as well, too, just in terms of their, their opportunities they have, possibly, you know, as far as like, you know, increasing the size of the country, you know, more, you know, economic, opportunities, jobs, things

Like you can't, this is a big deal. This is a big deal.

You know, only small companies. Oh, no, it's only a small country, right? It's just gonna keep going. Only a small continent, next is the next one, right? Yeah, yeah. And like obviously it

made other countries be like, "Oh, that's an option, " you know? So it's one of those things, yeah, where someone like plays a move, like it's like, "Oh, like, you know, like, like, oh, you could do that? "

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Okay, you know, we don't need everyone, you know, at the same time to hit go at, you know, right? 'Cause like, you know, that itself is like a very decentralizing force. So the thing is where it's like, you know, even if you're not really using a feature, as long as it doesn't, you know, like, mess up the integrity of your own coins and like your security model itself, it's, it's really okay, right? So I feel like at times people, you know, with the whole USF thing, try to like Approval consensus like that, we wouldn't really need POW, right? You know, we would say, okay, why don't we just do this? Like, it was like, that's the thing where it's like, it's hard to sample, which is why, like, you know, we have things like the hash rate itself, the price of the coin, people done futures in the past, things like that as well, too. And the one principle, again, like, because it's a software, it's completely opt-in, if you don't wanna use it, you They like softworks work pretty well. We've done, we've done a bunch of them right now. obviously, you know, there's, I mean, I think the thing, the thing is well, like, you know, definitely isn't zero risk with the software too. You still can't have, you know, physical things like that as well too, but you kind of like need to kind of like have like a more principled approach going about and kind of evaluate the benefits and the trade-offs, things like that as well too. And once again, worst case, you know

As long as my coins are okay, that's fine. So I think that's an important thing that, you know, it's kind of like a big thing for people to need to uphold and also kind of embrace that, okay, well, you know, things can move forward, but as long as like your own, you know, currency security is modified, it's, it's fine. It's kind of, because otherwise it's, it's kind of like, you know, you have this weird thing like, what are you crazy kids doing over there? You gotta stop all that.

It's

like

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's also interesting, one way to put it is, even if we didn't use all these fancy things with the Lightning Network and upgrading to multi-party channels and so on, even the Lightning Bank approach, even having that, like many Lightning Banks distributed around the world, right? Bitcoin Beach style wallets, and maybe they would have proof of reserves, which is a feature that the team at Galloy Money are looking at, that- You know, we even that would be a massive, massive improvement of the current financial system. But what we're going for here is extra credit. We're making it, we're, we're looking for like, yeah, yeah, no,

I think, I think it's definitely a good way to put it. Like, I guess like I, like, I like to live in kind of like that, like extra credit way. And I think the other thing that, you know, people, you know, shouldn't forget, like, you know, for the first time people kind of like have like a Depending on like, you know, the level of competence or techno-techno-literacy can like lie in any point of that gradient basically, but the fact that that exists at all is a big thing because before people were just born into, okay, this is my option, here's Wells Fargo, here's the, the same thing, you know, in the background anyway, right? So, so, so I think there's definitely something really cool, and it's also just like, once again, like very surreal to basically see kind of like, you know, things broaden more and more where now It's just, it's definitely super exciting, and it feels surreal at times, basically like how much stuff has expanded over time, basically, and just that this thing is still going. 'Cause I feel like, you know, people, you know, the one thing I always like saying, okay, well, you know, a block was produced, you know, fifteen minutes ago, right? Or four minutes ago. It's, it's still happening. Like, you know, the, the, the chain is still working, it's still going, power is still training.

Talking about this idea of trying to, you know, going for extra credit, as it were, this idea of having multi-party channels, whatever we're gonna call them, what happens? So coming back to what we were saying earlier that, you know, on average, it's kind of two or three thousand transactions in a Bitcoin block, on average, let's say, and what happens if a lot of people all need to claim back on chain at the same time?

Exactly. No, yeah. No, no, super good question. So like, this is something that, like, it Constraint, like, like the whole like Pinoar principle, basically, you have like eight slots, you have ten people, obviously not everyone can get a slot. So I think one thing is, you know, super important, and this, like, I think Jeremy Rubin's done like really cool, a bunch of work around kind of like, you know, what he calls kind of like congestion control, basically. So like the, the ability to kind of like, you know, have initial transaction going through the chain, and that transaction basically allows you to kind of like, you know, have different

Fear where time like operations, you know, within the system itself, right? so the idea would be to say, okay, like, you know, we, we encode into the contract if the fee rate is over, you know, hundredths, it's how to buy in, in a, a, a, a box like that, we can like pause it and like, you know, move it on for things like that, right? But, you know, that stuff was like never fully completed. I, I definitely think you probably have some, some more stuff there, basically as Architect that things like that as well too, and I, I definitely think that's like an important research, like once again, things that like, you know, we can like, you know, devise to basically help to like, you know, mitigate and solve the problems. I think those are definitely super high priority in my mind because, you know, once again, you wanna make sure that people can, like, you know, basically always go back to layer one, which once again, like, you know, you have, you have the coin jar, that's like, that's, that's the

You know, so, so super important. But in particular, kind of like, you know, things like we were working on stuff like package relay as well too, just to be, basically kind of like ensure, like, you know, I can actually get into the chain and I can like modify my fees, you know, and, and things like that as well too. and, you know, I can say, you know, something else that, like, you know, people looked at in the past, which I think is kind of like a, a big thing, just in terms Obviously, once again, it's not gonna be as good as base chain, but like, you know, for example, like, a reminder like, feasibly, like, where else would we have something like, you know, CTR, more advanced things to be deployed in a wide scale? You can say maybe it's too, you know, you know, complex or kind of like, you know, implications or whatever else are, you know, too far fetched to basically happen on chain. But then what if we can have you move those things out? So I Users as well too, just because like you can say like, you know, in, in the end, it's my, you know, kind of like, different, they'll probably all be like somewhat, you know, additive basically. I can, like, you know, move my coin over here, over here, I can do this thing here and, and there and things like that as well too. So that kind of, like, you know, outward evolution is super important, also just to be able to allow people to kind of, like, you know, rapidly experiment and kind of,

Some everything that we r-rallied around, I think X-Credit is important to basically kind of, you know, expand things more and more, and then basically enable people to basically opt into the system, you know, like anything else, and you can say, okay, maybe, maybe they're kind of like, you know, in, in like, like wandering in the desert with Doge and, and Shiba or whatever else, but like, at the end of the day, I wanna make sure they have a slot,

you know what I

mean? Like, they'll come Money Citadel of Bitcoin. so I guess then the answer is if they, if there's a lot of people all trying to reclaim back on chain at once, we're reliant then on research around things like, yeah, as you said, package relay, our friend Gloria Zhou with, mempool, except that might be, that might sort of play into that as well, this idea of being able to have your Bitcoin node see a transaction, see that it's not being confirmed, but be able to construct its own I guess transactions based off of that, that then allow you to maybe go-- I, maybe I don't understand this as well as you do, but maybe you might be leaving one channel factory to join another one or something like that in that kind of construction. Is that the sort of thing that would be possible?

yeah, because I, another thing as well is like, you know, for example, you can say like, you know, like, let's say those kind of accounts people were trying to like handle like their own breach at the same time, like, what if they can kind That would definitely save a lot on chain space, 'cause you kind of like, you know, you compress down things, you kind of like have like a batching like savings as well too. So I guess that's some, definitely something that's kind of like, you know, within, current like technical feasibility, the only thing that requires there is kind of like, you know, kind of like a coordination layer to allow people to kind of like discover themselves and also exchange messages and things like that, right? but, you know, definitely like things, things are far, further off Off-chain, be like, okay, my bad, like, you know, like, we're both not gonna get you over here, let's just, let's, let's, my bad, let's just, let's settle up, you know? Like, it's all good, like, no hard feelings, you know? Like, maybe, maybe that's possible as well, too, just to kind of like, you know, go a different direction. But I think these are definitely, you know, all, I think, kind of some like very, like, the key research questions right now Things like how do we address these things, how do you solve this? And I, I think this topic is really cool because it kind of like lets, kind of like a new developer and a researcher kind of like come to the space and see, see, okay, like, you know, where can I have the most impact basically? Like, what are the kind of like the pressing questions going on here? you know, to avoid them from like maybe getting, you know, bogged down or like, trying to like, you know, really like, just like rediscover things to make sure, you know, we, we're like, you know, get the full credit on our extra credit, right? Not like have like a partial submission, that maybe, doesn't really fulfill a lot of the account requirements or goals, that we set out to do.

Yeah, right, right. and I'm also curious as well, I know there's been more work around anchor output channels, and that's actually in the new version zero point one three of LND that, becoming the default for nodes who both support anchor output channels.

Transaction pinning problem or does it, is there an interaction there or not at all?

yeah, yeah. So, so it helps because like, there's something that added, I think, you know, Matt kind of like led it to kind of like basically add like what's like an exception in some like edge case that kind of like led to some of the pinning behavior in Bitcoin itself. So basically, the idea is like, okay, well, you can kind of like have like this one more, your output basically,

and, and because like,

Another thing that we kind of realized over time is that, like, you know, opt-in RBF was added to kind of, like, you know, placate, you know, certain companies at the time that basically really wanted zero-conf, you know, things like, you know, Coinbase or whoever else people that kind of really wanted that. So I think we're realizing as well that, okay, you know, it has some words, maybe, maybe we just need to go to full RBF. The difference is like, you know, opt-in basically have to like signal on the blockchain, okay, Because you don't really know exactly like what the relay network is running or what the miners running as well too, it's kind of a thing where it, it, it is still super fuzzy. So, so that's why I think, you know, people talk about these attacks as well too, things like that, but like it just seems like at times like, you know, they have like a Goldilocks model of, okay, well, you know, like the, the, the fee is just like low enough where it's not getting dropped on the mempool, but it's

Or, you know, as Eric said, they can be, security-wise.

Got it. Yeah, yeah. And so with Taproot coming, I'm curious as well, your thoughts on whether there is potential to use something like MuSig two as part of Lightning Network and the way Lightning nodes talk to each other, is that something you're looking at? What's the thought there?

Yeah, yeah. No, definitely, definitely. yeah, I mean, so like, you know, definitely like, you know, it generally can just like compress them down a lot too People are getting these like public stats about the network by kind of like looking at like what are kind of like, you know, you know, P2SH outputs type thing, you know, multi-sig things, whatever else. The cool thing about this is like this basically lets, you know, any transaction look, any, any given transaction also like kind of like blend in, right? So a lightning channel could look at the number of transactions as well, too. I think this is cool in the context of things like, you know, pool, where it's like, okay, well, people are kind Those, things that we talk about as far as kind of like this, like, you know, u-root UTXO, kind of like, you know, on rolling process, because you can kind of like, you know, basically encode different possibilities in the taproot tree and not really have to commit to that itself, that kind of really opens up the design space for like what can we really be doing in general. So another cool thing that it allows, like, you know, something people were talking, talking about in the past, this thing called like a PTLC, which rather than like It really builds the design space, then you add DLCs on top of that as well too. I think it's a thing where it's like, you know, I feel like, like design space is basically just so large, once you add stuff like that itself, and then it gets even larger as well too. So I think one thing we're working on in the background, and I think, you know, Rusty and some other people have like different ways doing as well, basically the ability to kind of, you know, update a channel on the fly, right? So, so one thing So instead, there's ways to basically like, so let's like, I have like a normal, you know, SegWit, channel output itself. So then, like, you and I are off-chain basically. We, we, we spend that transaction, right? Then we have a new transaction, then it creates the taproot output, right? And then we actually just keep that off-chain, and we never need to publish that unless we actually need to force close. So, so the thing is, it's actually the same thing, because otherwise, you basically need to close and then open Other things, they're doing, you know, other, you know, kind of like, you know, more elaborate channels, things like that as well, too. So it should be the case that where it's, you know, as long as you have like this two-two multisig type, con-contract of like the channel, you can then upgrade that on the fly as if you download, download like a new application on your phone, right? So I think that's like where I definitely we, we can, we can get to. So yeah, I think it's really important So like the, the only thing we can do basically like, you know, kind of like reduce the number of like, you know, on transactions we can do to kind of like control interactions or try like modifying parameters like that. I think it's definitely like, like a big thing going forward, and, yeah, but I, I guess that's the other thing is like we've kind of like yet to really get together and like make a big push to kind of like do all the designs, you know, for kind of, you know, post taproot lightning, definitely much like mailing Something very simple to begin with, and then go from there, 'cause otherwise, maybe it's gonna like, you know, get really bogged down in terms of like, you know, trying to like do everything all at once. I think the other thing, like, you know, if, you know, the world is opening up a little bit more now, like, we definitely really get to get, basically get back, you know, kind of in-person meetings with developers, 'cause I think those are very, very high value people talk about a bunch of things as well, too. We

And, and getting back, you know, getting MeSpace going, just 'cause like, you know, once, once you're back, like, my conference talked to my developers, okay, like, this, this, this is kinda cool, this is why, you know, there's human interaction, like, it's, it's cool.

Yeah, that's, that'll be great to see. so another thing I was interested to chat about is this whole idea of- Spontaneous payments, and I know that's something coming up in the new LND. So I guess this has gone through all sorts of different iterations, right? Because in the past, people have used, you know, they've had to make a new invoice to receive donations or just to receive money. Then there was Keysend, and now we've got this, spontaneous payments idea. So can you tell us a little bit about that? What is that?

yeah, super good question. So like, you know, typically the way like payments work in Lightning, say, you

kind of Basically, until it gets to the destination, then, then the destination then actually reveals the pre-image and then goes all the way backwards and the payment, payments are, are fulfilled, right? So, so push payment and taproot, taproot works a little bit differently, 'cause instead, like, you know, rather than, the receiver generating that like secret value, I generate it myself, I then encrypt it in the onion payload of the actual payment I'm sending to you itself, it gets all the way to you, then you decrypt that and then settle that yourself, right? And that's Like there's something called MPP, Multi-Payments, basically lets you kind of like, you know, split payment, split payment up into several different charges based on that individual. So AMP does that for basically for keysend, right? So I would say now you can then kind of like, you know, do that same thing where I can like push your payment with only public key, and then like kind of split up payment up in general. This is really cool because now this lets you do things like, you know, kind of like, you know, spontaneous tipping, maybe like you, It took a little bit to like, you know, realize in software, but we definitely learned a lot along the way. We don't have a bunch of other cool, you know, things coming up as well, too. One other thing, it lets you also, you know, kind of like, you know, like we, we use invoice more like you would, like a normal kind of Bitcoin address, right? Like, you know, rather than, like, you know, me needing to fetch an invoice every single time, which has issues as far as, like, you know, maybe it So it is nice to basically kind of like have that, okay, like one, one and done type of thing. Where imagine like, you know, in the future, let, let's say like, you know, I'm like renting a scooter and it has a QR code and I do an AM payment to that, right? And boom, it's there, right? And, you know, that can just like work. So it's kind of like an example, kind of like compress it down the steps a little bit more. That thing's really cool. So one of the other things that people are That message, once again, is like fully encrypted, you know, and to an, to the individual, things really cool because then once people kind of, you know, do a lot of experimentation as far as, you know, what can you do, you know, what kind of, you know, cool things you can prospect, adding like small amount metadata in the protocol to particular payment, which is, which I think is a, is a cool thing.

Right. Yeah. So this is going to be very handy for people who are online and they, they wanna have just a static QR

so they

It's difficult for people who aren't really deep into this world, and then even then, if they had to set up the BTC pay server, they would have also have to set up the corresponding channels and have inbound liquidity, and they'd have to kind of manage all of that aspects. So in this case, I mean, it looks like they would still have to manage inbound liquidity, but at least now it's just one QR, so there's not, interactivity right, right? Like the-

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It, it just, it's more vital to kind of like the You know, if, if I like have like a deposit address, like, it's like an, actually like an invoice, and I pay it basically, unless I want to deposit again and I use that invoice again, I can potentially actually lose money, right? Because at that point, like, the preimage is already known in the network basically, so if I wrap through those same period, they can just take it. So I think in practice, it hasn't really happened yet, which is, you know, definitely, you know, super relieved about that, but like something like this would basically things like that, but I think that's cool. I think another great thing I've noticed is, as like, I feel like, at least here in the US, like, the many restaurants can now kind of like basically have the menus on QR codes. Remember like when I first first came to Bitcoin, I was like, "Oh my God, they're like, oh, QR codes aren't gonna work, it's, it's only thing only works in China, we can't work in the West." But I think now it's the thing where it's like, like We need to go the pathways for new, you're always getting to exchange information on the internet.

Yeah, that's called the QR, yeah, definitely the QR conversation has definitely, with all, with all this stuff over the last year or two, it's been, yeah, a lot more QRs. so then I guess in the future, that could be maybe some Bitcoin wallet developer builds up on the new version of LND and they're building this feature, this capability to just put up a static QR, and that would be really useful because then I know there would be a lot of

Twitch streamer and they can just put up one QR, right?

Exactly, yeah. C- I don't, there's this like, developer, I don't remember their name, but like, you know, they use, basically like LN Bits, and I think, also like the LN Bits developer, I think his name is Ben, they kind of like have a thing where like, something called OBS, which is kind of like this, like, open source software people use to be- typically do Twitch things like that. So basically they integrated, you Very direct, you know, between you and the streamer itself, there's no other people, you know, between that itself. But I think the other cool thing is, like, you know, I don't know if you've seen, but typically people like add like a message whenever they do like a donation or a tip, you can then also actually add the message, you know, in the Lightning payment itself, right? So it's kind of like a fully end-to-end thing. And this is definitely, you know, example of like a lot of the cool innovation that's possible just by kind of you know, more open, more accessible, you know, definitely like a very big thing for just, you know, everyone. Yeah,

that's cool. and also just around MPP versus AMP, could you just clarify what's, you know, the, the current state of play there in terms of LND? Like, it obviously supports MPP, but now you're looking at this idea of having AMP as well. So can you just out-- outline the differences there for listeners

out there? def, def, def. Yeah, something that we A single channel basically had to have the capacity to satisfy your payment, so therefore you kind of like had to have like very big channels, you know, that kind of like had a bunch of like issues as well too. So in this case, because we can do payments splitting, it lets, you know, things flow a little more, you know, directly. So the difference is like, so MPP actually uses the same payment hash for every single, you know, kind of like payment shard within the, the round itself, right? So this, this is like, you know, works Receiver actually has a preimage for MPP, it is possible, once again, I'm not, I'm not sure if this actually in the wild, where someone basically like, you know, pulls too early, and because they pull too early, maybe it feels like a bug in the software or else, that kind of like, you know, means like they can't, they can never get the full amount of money, right? Because now in this case, if they pulled early and then someone else like sent that payment, they don't the payment hash, they can potentially lose money because the individual, you And then payment hash as well. So you kinda have things be a little more diffuse, maybe potentially like, you know, a little more difficult to actually, correlate, right? And one other thing, with Ampers MPP, so like whenever I'm doing kind of my MPP, I basically need kind of like a full invoice, the invoice has the payment hash, like, you know, your pub key, things like that as well. Two, with Ampers, in theory, I only just need your public key, right? So that means the, the invoice is gonna be even You know, route for me to get the invoice in the first place, but then has kind of other constraints around, you know, the payment hash, how those things are done and things like that. I

see. So then, I guess theoretically AMP is a little bit more private because as you're saying, it's a little harder to correlate, obviously, if there's different pre-images for the different chunks of Bitcoin that you're sending along the different routes to get to that other person. and then would it be any more difficult from a routing perspective? Like, I guess what you're saying

to this node, and so basically it's relying on, let's say, on my wallet or my lightning node has to have its view of the network and know, oh, I know I'm paying Laolu's node over here, right?

Not necessarily, 'cause you're kind of like doing the same thing basically. So maybe with MPP, like in theory, you don't want to like, you know, reuse a node in the route, because if they get the preimage a little bit earlier, that could, that could be a weird thing as well, too. But I think the other thing I'm good. Right, so I think that's, I think that's a cool thing as well, too. I think also, like, because the way Lightning was set up, like, because, like, you know, these two things were kind of, you know, end-to-end updates, you know, assuming you have kind of like the, the new protocol to, like, add the, the routing information, within the entire network, basically at this point, like, you know, any two people can start to use it, you know, right now. And so I think that's the other cool thing too, is like, you know, because like the writing size, the writing pack basically remains fixed size the entire time during the processing, they aren't really able to distinguish, okay, well, you know, that's a podcast payment, this is, you know, a subscription payment, things like that as well too. So I think it definitely kind of like, you know, shows like the cool things that we added into Lightning to basically make it like, you know, extensible over time, but then also, you know, just like, you know,

Like there was thing on Twitter the other day, it was kind of like a video of the Lightning conference that we had in Berlin. Like, I was like, "Oh, shit, that took me back. That was, that was so..." Oh man,

I can't wait for another one. So

maybe in twenty twenty-two. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah. So I think some, something definitely is gonna happen, and

it'll just be bigger and better now. So, you definitely can look forward to that. Yeah, that's cool. So I guess maybe my summary of it then, step of the route, it just could split up and go across. And now what you're talking about here is we're having AMP, which is like maybe a little bit more, arguably a little bit more private, and, you know, some slightly different features there, but basically a similar kind of function. And then potentially in the future, once Taproot comes live on the network, then we're gonna have like the, the Taproot PTL-C, AMP, right? Yeah,

yeah. And I think, I think the cool thing as well, you realize, like, you know

You know, for example, surebase, like working on things like, okay, being able to like send kind of like, like a DLC type contract over a multi-op channel, things like that as well too. I think this, this is like an amazing thing because like, first, now we have kind of like an open, you know, payment system, this like, kind of like open, like monetary rail that we can evolve over time, and I think that's just like an insanely powerful thing. And, and once again, I think the cool thing is like, you know,

I don't wanna get caught up in like, you know, the day to day. It's like, okay, well, stepping back, like, yo, like people, people, people done a lot of really cool stuff, and once again, just like, people didn't know each other, they kinda like band together for this, you know, shared goal over the internet,

so I don't know, it's, it's definitely really cool. That's cool. one other

feature I saw in LND zero point one three is pruned node support. So can you tell Node LD or some other places as well too, you kind of like had to like have like the, all the disk space there. So like, you know, right now, I think it's, it's a point where it's like, you know, it's like over three hundred or so gigabytes or whatever else, so something that, that, that becomes a lot more prohibitive. I think also like, you know, if people were wanting to be running on like, you know, kind of like smaller, you know, cloud, you know, offerings basically, kind of like, you And then in this case, the LND would come on and say, "Okay, well, you know, I need block twenty-two, it doesn't exist. What do I do?" Right? So the thing that was one of the things where it's like, you know, in practice, it was probably okay, but we didn't really want to re-recommend it, you know, directly, right? So what we, what we ended up implementing, you know, in LND is that, you know, now, like, once again, because we kind of like have like this code D node, if L and D ever needs to do things like a re-scan or go back to other blocks and things like that, can basically just fetch it, fetch it, fetch it from the peer-to-peer network. This is really cool because now it's basically like, you know, once again, like lowers the cost of operating a lightning node, because you, you know, now you don't need that like five hundred, you know, gigabyte like SSD on the side of your phone, you can kind of like just have your initial, you know, like maybe like Also, also in particular, we're seeing now, it's like it's even harder just to get computer hardware around the world now due to like, you know, things, you know, the ports are kind of, you know, clogging up, COVID-related stuff, you know, cost of just raw goods are going up as well too. So anything that we can do to make, you know, operating and lighting, you know, cheaper, I think is definitely a really big win of people, you know, around the world.

Cool, cool. So essentially, L and D will connect to

And this is also calling back to what you were saying earlier, how there's-- the protocol is there, and that's the base thing that's going on, but then around the edges, there are people out there doing fancy things to make a nicer user experience for their users. So, you know, examples of like the Phoenix Breeze and Moon, where they, as an example, Phoenix have like a routing hint to an unannounced or private channel that doesn't exist yet to kind of make it easy to-- And then this idea of on-the-fly channels, or, Channels that are created just like they don't exist yet, but when you take the payment, it makes the channel then, and, and then there's a little bit of trust involved in that initial period while you're waiting for the channel to settle and things. So I guess, how does that, you know, what sort of things do you see coming in the mobile application sphere for the new users who are just new to Bitcoin and Lightning, and, you know, how do you sort of see that interacting back with, say, LND and C-Lightning and, and Eclair and

I think what you're saying, like, I feel like over like the past like two or three years, I think like the UX of wallets have like, you know, really like increased significantly, basically, right? Compared to like, you know, what we were using back in the day. I think definitely, you know, people like, you know, Asynk and Breeze have really kind of, you know, led the charge there, Moon as well, too. Kind of like, you know, once again, like, you know, they were able to, like, you know, add new To, you know, I think maybe, you know, ability to like, you know, kind of like have like other applications, kind of like, you know, ask their mobile wallet for certain permissions possibly. So like, you know, you can imagine, let's say I have like a game, and that game kind of, you know, adds, gets like a macro from LND, and it's saying, okay, well, you know, I wanna, like, you know, like bet on who's gonna win, like the, the basketball game I like use something called WebAssembly, which is kind of like this like VM, you know, type system that's running directly in the browser, that can kind of like, you know, have my LND node running directly in my Chrome browser itself, right? I think it's really cool because now, like, you can kind of like have, like, you know, more kind of like seamless interactions, with like the web itself. So like, rather than like, you know, me clicking, getting an invoice, getting my phone, copy-pasting, scanning,

whatever else, I And I want to then, okay, sixty dollars, you know, you're listening to the Wall Street Journal, I don't really care, like, you know, I just wanna give me the information, here's five sats, you know? So I think if we can like, you know, kind of cross that barrier, that could really unlock, I think, just a lot of, you know, earning potential for like, you know, different like writers, journalists, you know, things like that as well, too. I think another thing that, I think would be cool is You know, collaborate to generate kind of like, you know, payments that pay another individual in a way using something like AMP as well too, whereas like, you know, we all kind of, you know, pay individually and they can't pool until everything's there. I think that's like, you know, one interesting thing there. But I think generally just kind of like, you know, enabling people to like, you know, have more like, seamless applications there, right? To kind of like, you know, cut down on some like the QR code scanning, you know, tap copy type Okay, collected, boom, and they go forward there. I think other, you know, things, in that direction are kind of like, you're trying to move forward with things like, you know, Elsat and Aperture, kind of like, you know, allowing, you know, people to kind of, you know, build APIs to, like, you know, more easily, like, monetize what's going on. I saw this really cool thing, it was definitely like a work in progress, basically like, so one thing I don't know if you Fraud, things like that. So I'm like, okay, well, you know, what if I just paid you hundreds of Satoshi? You know, like, once again, this is the whole, you know, hashcash spam type of thing. So I think it definitely has a lot of potential. I saw someone they basically made a thing where it's like starting to go in that direction where basically you can kind of like, you know, pay in real time to the application, and the application itself would then, like, you know, keep a VM alive for you, right? So I guess a

you know, we're talking about because maybe you think practically this is like fine that it's right now, we probably just need that kind of, you know, payment layer, there and we have that right now, it's getting better, you know, every day, so I think there's, there's a few things that, I think would be really cool to start to, you know, see going forward.

Excellent. And in terms of fees on the network, that's something where I think- It's, it's extremely low right now, like basically most of the time when you're routing a payment, it's, we're talking one sat or less, right? Oh, yeah. You're looking, you forgot about it? Yeah. We're talking like point oh three six of a cent or something like in that range, right? I wonder, does that rise up over time as people start to-- Because I think at the start it was maybe more like a training wheels and people were just doing it as a hobby, but then over time, that, you would expect that would rise because

e-e They're, they're, you know, they're, they're locking up money into a channel, and they obviously wanna do that entrepreneurially, they wanna put, they wanna open a channel in the direction that they think funds are going to flow. So I'm wondering, do you have any ideas on, you know, that aspect of fees rising over time? Like, would it be kind of like point one percent or point five percent longer term, do you think? Or do-- We don't, we still don't really know.

good, good question. I feel like it's definitely Drops even more, like, you know, we have like another twenty-five percent down, like a week or two or whatever else, but actually a lot slower. You can say, okay, well, fees will start to go up, you know, on Lightning because, you know, there's just so much demand and they realize, okay, I can charge, you know, half a percent, people will still do it. So maybe, maybe they don't see it go, but then I, I think you see, like, you know, as, like, you know, more and more people like You know, borrowing more as well too. If they go, then like maybe, like, you know, then maybe people like, you know, see that rising rate, then kind of like add even more capital and that goes back down again, like what we see, you know, typically in other, you know, kind of like lending markets and things like that as well too. So I think it, it'll be a thing where I think it'll definitely regulate over time. I guess I'm not super worried about it, like, you know, staying very high for long, just once again because, like

Categories of users, like one basic don't really care about the fees, they wanna just like, you know, run a node, think it's really cool. Then maybe there's people that maybe, you know, starting to like break even when they consider the writing fees. I think there's other individuals kind of like in a way ahead of the curve actually making, you know, money, you know, maybe like fueling services, you know, a month, things like that as well. Two, I think it's definitely cool you kind of like have that gradient basically. you know, over time

Or what fees would be comparably, but at the same time you kind of like have like, you know, a period of time where things like, you know, go, you know, wax and wane. So one thing that, like, I think is interesting, which I guess like, do I have this data? Like, you know, for, for example, you know, you could actually look at the current, like, a-advertised, like, you know, fee policy of every single northern network to see, okay, like, you know, like what's the So fees or the mempool size, right? So I think it'd be a cool thing to like, you know, overlay over each other. You know, maybe there's some like, you know, slight correlation, you know, there right now. I imagine over time it becomes a little bit more tightly correlated, but it's something that, you know, maybe someone's like, maybe, maybe someone has a bot and they're doing this already, I don't know, but like, it's kind of like, you know, things as far as the, the design space there that, you know,

The, the tooling and everything, and, you know, Lightning dashboards, you know, Lightning Terminal, I know you have, the, that, that these terminals and dashboards allow people to maybe tune their fees like a little bit like a knob, and you sort of see, oh, okay, there's a lot of congestion right now. You know, it might be like in the future, like if people say there's a supply chain shortage, so therefore the cost of, whatever, this, car is really expensive, maybe in the future it's gonna be like, Routing node operators have had to turn their fees up a little bit to compensate because they're paying more for on-chain fees to kind of manage the underground, the underlying liquidity. But it's always this constantly shifting game because at the same time, exactly, you're batching things as well, because you might be doing like a, like you might be loop in, loop out, like batching all these things in and out. So it's, it's, I guess it's kind of complicated to see where it ends up.

Yeah, no, yeah, it's definitely kind of like a very, like,

You know, so I, I feel like, you know, in Bitcoin, like typically, like, you know, the practice is super, it's typically like, like, you know, beyond like where the theory is, which is like maybe sometimes like, you know, really, people just like do the thing basically, then over time, people start to kind of, you know, formalize it more and more. So I think we, we definitely started to see like a lot of people who, you know, come up with Lightning, as far as like, you know, how to Iterative process basically people finding out, you know, all this knowledge, like spreading it, and like then it's catching up with software, the protocol, things like that as well too. So it's definitely like a, you know, super interesting system, and one that obviously never existed before, and, you know, that's, it's super, super pretty cool.

That's awesome. So, and I guess anything else before we wrap up, like, what, what's your outlook over the next, you know, a couple of months, in terms of what

I think one thing we're starting to kind of focus on is like, you know, making sure LND can like keep up with the scale of where Lightning is right now. So I think it was in the beginning, we kind of like, you know, made some decisions earlier on, like because like, okay, we're, we're gonna kind of, you know, serve like all the type of users, mobile nodes, Raspberry Pi nodes, that kind of thing, too. I think it was saying, okay, well, you know, people are like running such large nodes, doing such large traffic,

New load, it was starting to work on, you know, kind of like standardizing a bunch of other things like having the protocol, and things like LNRRL as well too. Starting to look at kind of like, you know, what, you know, Taproot kind of like allows for, for, for the, for the system as far as like, you know, having more transaction types, things like that. I think the other cool thing that, like, you know, we definitely can't ignore since coming up with more and more is kind of like, you know, like Maybe I can like, you know, try to like stress like my view, you know, on where things are going. I think it's a bunch of really cool things, you know, in, in there there. Also kind of like obviously the con-concurrent evolution on pool, starting to basically do things like, you know, like have like streaming interest rates, you know, things like let me, you know, kind of like let, let, let me kind of, you know, sell the cash flow of my lease payment to you, you know, over time as well too. Really cool things, people are working on right now, just like, you know, a few things there. I, I think the, I think the hardest stuff about this stuff is I was like, you know, picking what to work on, 'cause there's just so much stuff. There's so many, there's so many opportunities, so many opport- you know, options like that. Definitely how, you know, to be like, kind of like a little more disciplined and focused, and like try to focus, on like what you think, you

know, is And, yeah, I'm a big fan of what you're doing. Thanks for all that. And, yeah, so listeners, make sure you follow Laolu. You can find him on Twitter, his handle is at roasbeef, and you can find lightning, lightning dot engineering, anywhere else you want people to find you, Laolu.

yeah, so we have, you know, our Twitter account, that's just like Twitter dot com slash lightning. definitely check out the GitHub, that's GitHub dot com slash Some, you know, initial, you know, points and pure starts like in macro things and, you know, join the community.

Excellent. Thanks for joining me.

Yeah, no problem. This, this is dope.

Get the show notes at stephanilivera dot com slash two eight nine. Find me on Twitter at stephanilivera, and I will see you in the citadels.