Bitcoin Lightning Education & Lightning Summit

Welcome to the Stephan Livera podcast.

Hey guys, it's your host Stephan Livera and this is episode thirty-seven. My guest today is Rene Pickhardt. He is originally a data scientist but is now doing a lot of Bitcoin Lightning developing and also educating using his YouTube channel. And also, he's a bit of a rising star within Light- Lightning, as he was recently selected to participate in the Lightning Summit, which are some of the topics that we touch on in this conversation. So without any further ado, here you go. Hey Renee, thanks very much for joining the show. How are you?

I'm fine, thank you very much for having me.

Yeah, Renee, I think I've, I've seen you do a lot of really impressive things in the short time that you've been around the Bitcoin and Lightning scene, so I just thought it would be excellent to get you on the show. Let's start with a little bit of your background.

Okay, so with my background, you mean my education. I'm a mathematician and, I tried to pursue a PhD in computer science and natural language processing,

Sure. And then what were you working in before you got into Bitcoin?

before I-- So, so that's a good question. I mean, when did I get into Bitcoin basically, right? I got interested in Bitcoin in 2013, so that was still during my PhD phases. But I didn't have the time to really go into Bitcoin, right? Because doing a PhD is kind of time-consuming. And afterwards, I was working as a high school teacher. And, I realized all the time I was talking to people about the Lightning Network because I thought this is such a neat technology, and I was talking Lightning and Lightning and Lightning, and at some point in time, I realized, "Dude, I have to do this." And, I didn't know if it's possible to like earn money by doing Lightning development, so I decided Decided since I have a lot of background in natural language processing, which is close to machine learning, that I would do some data science consulting for a living, and to mainly try to get as much free time as possible to work on the Lightning network.

Fantastic. So around what time did you really start contributing more or doing more work with Lightning?

So I would say I, I really started looking at code and the spec in the beginning of this year, like January, and then I unfortunately became sick for a little bit, and I think I think around April, I wrote the German Wikipedia article about the Lightning Network, and I think in June, July, I really started off, I went to the second Lightning Hack Day organized by Fulmo in Berlin, and it was there when I realized that, also I already had acquired quite some knowledge about it, and it was really great talking to the other people and realizing that there's so much going on, and that really motivated me a lot. So, yeah, it's pretty much four months from now where I'm doing this basically on an everyday basis.

Excellent. And then, how did you go about learning yourself?

Yeah, so, I mean, I was following Reddit for a long time, so, so I saw that there's some stuff going on, but obviously you don't learn the Lightning network there. And, I mean, the next natural thing to do was to read the white paper. And to be honest, I think, the Lightning white paper isn't the best spot to learn about the Lightning network. It's, Yeah, I'm not such a big fan of this paper. the Bitcoin white paper is written much better. and then, I started reading the Lightning RFCs, and I think this is where I really learned it. And it's really funny because, the RFC I kind of spent most time of was the, the RFC number zero, where it's basically the introduction and, the glossary where all the terms are explained. And I was studying this really hard in the very beginning without reading the rest of the spec and tried to make Sense of the terms and try to like, what should the commitment message be and what should a revocation key be and how does this fit together? And from there on, I kind of realized that I like understood the concepts already with what I saw from the white paper before and then I was just reading through the specs.

Fantastic. And then the other thing I was keen to ask you about, Renee, was part of your, I guess, your journey to coming to Bitcoin and Lightning. I know you were previously or you might be currently involved with The Pirate Party. What were your aims politically?

So that is actually not so much, related to Bitcoin and Lightning. It's actually funny because the Pirate Party in the very early days already accepted Bitcoin donations, but nowadays they don't even have a position on Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies in general. my political goals were basically two, the first one was that everything that is funded with public money should also belong to the public. that's- Pretty much this open access, open education, open data movement where you say, "Um, we give money to universities to do research, and then the people in the universities publish their books and it belongs to publishers, and people have to buy back the articles." That doesn't make sense. So it's very closely related to copyright, which obviously is also an issue on the internet, right? I mean, also in open source is the question, but also with video content like I'm producing, or just regular texts. And, and then the other- Topic that's very specific to Germany, I would say, is, the regulation of mobile carriers. In Germany, we have a really bad market. So you pay a really high price in Germany to get maybe like one or two gigabytes of, internet traffic on your mobile carrier, and that doesn't really make sense, and I would personally think, and many people in the Pirate Party do, that there needs to be regulation.

Right. And what sort of regulation do you argue for?

Well, basically we argue for the fact that a flat- Flat rate should be a flat rate in that you couldn't limit the data volume on a mobile carrier contract, because we think that mobile internet is, basically infrastructure, and the better mobile internet we have in a society, the more access to communication and data and information people have, and this will contribute to a flourishing society. So basically, To put it in one sentence, we would just, make it illegal to have, data volume limitation on, on, mobile contracts. Right.

And that's sort of related as well, you were mentioning earlier around this concept of access to information, to books online and that sort of thing. Yes. Do you guys have a position in terms of so-called intellectual property laws, or do you believe that it's more-- You know, it, it, there isn't no such thing.

Yeah, so, so that is interesting. I think you have to look at this a little bit more historically from where the Pirate Party came from. I mean, if you look at the name, there is "pirate" inside, and it was very much about piracy. and in the beginning, a lot of people in the Pirate Party thought, "No, there shouldn't be such thing as intellectual property." But I would say pretty quickly, people in the Pirate Party realized that, intellectual property thing. and the problem with intellectual property in the current system basically is that there's always the rights holders that buy licenses from the, creators, and that the right holders become, such a strong, powerful entity, and this is really a problem. So for example, if you look in the music industry, if you are a music artist and you want to get booked for a show, at least in Germany, people will tell you, "Without a record deal, we can't book you because..." Because you're not relevant. But there are no good record deals for, for musician. I mean, when, when a musician, makes a record deal, they get like fifty cent, for, for a CD that is being sold, but the CD is being sold for fifteen euro. So, so that is a bad deal. Why would you ever do this? The distribution network of the industry isn't that great. I mean, nowadays you can ship your music basically for free on the internet. even if you sell music on, on iTunes, why does iTunes have to get fifty percent Companies like Apple can make these rules because they're so powerful, right? And that is something where the Pirate Party, puts the finger in and says, "You know what? We, we, we kind of need a mechanism to protect, creators."

I see. Yeah, so I think the view that maybe an Austrian libertarian might take is that there shouldn't be intellectual property, but perhaps we might say something like, "There's an unfair or just an unjust level of centralization into some of these large companies, and part of that is a creation of the state," in that sort of view. But in some sense, you can see there's some similarities and some differences in that viewpoint. Yes. But yeah, I mean, let's, let's bring it Going back to, Bitcoin. And let me just, let me just add one thing

maybe. I have to, I, I have to say that, the Pirate Party isn't so libertarian as people might think. it's actually one of the reasons I would say why the Pirate Party in Germany is struggling a lot, because it's a mixture of a libertarian point of view, very libertarian, but also of a very socialist point of view. And I mean, these are two concepts that usually don't go along very well. And in the Pirate Party, people came together, like- Liking ideas from both sides, but that usually always brings up fights at some point in time, and that's difficult, right? So, just wanted to say that it's, it's not so libertarian as people might think.

understood, understood. I suppose that you just get some weird conflicts there, and it's kind of difficult to make things happen, I suppose.

Yeah, but they, they call themselves a social libertarian party, which, which to some degree is ridiculous, right? but if you're in the party and if the movement for a long time, you kind of This and it kind of makes sense, but I guess it's still hard to explain.

So you mentioned there that there wasn't really a big connection there between involvement with the Pirate Party and your Bitcoin and Lightning work.

Maybe for me personally, yes, because, if, if you take the example with the music industry that I gave you, one thing that I personally always think is very difficult if there's too much power accumulated at one certain entity. And I mean, if you, if you take this into consideration, then it makes sense to get involved in- To Bitcoin, right? Because we take the power away from banks or from the federal banks or central banks, right? by making, a monetary system that belongs to the people and that isn't controlled by a single entity. So, so that makes a lot of sense from my point of view, and I think it also goes along with my philosophy of why I'm a pirate and why I'm in the Pirate Party.

I suppose you can obviously, the, you can see the, what, what would you call it, the obviously arguments there around being able to make a payment that nobody can stop

Right. So the Pirate Party, as I said, is social libertarian, so there is this notion of freedom, right? We, we think freedom is one of the greatest and biggest values we have. we just also think that in some situations, especially companies, should be regulated.

Okay. but let's bring it now to You know, Bitcoin and Lightning education. So tell us, you know, what made you start the YouTube channel and start doing tutorials?

Yes. So, two reasons basically. first, when, when I started reading the source code of C-Lightning and started to learn more about Lightning, I realized in, some Telegram groups that there's a lot of need for education about the Lightning network. There's a lot of misconceptions out and a lot of people- Really struggled to understand even details. I was sitting together with a company actually, that were thinking to roll out the Lightning Network to a huge customer base, more than a million customers, and was a crypto company, right? Bitcoin company actually. and I was talking to the CEO, it's a profitable company, and I realized the CEO who was thinking about to implement Lightning didn't understand how a payment channel really operates. he just knew in the abstract way there is a payment channel. But he didn't know the construction, and I personally think the construction isn't so difficult. So I thought, well, we need to educate people if we want to have the Lightning Network up and running. It's, it's not only about providing APIs and documentation, but also to educate people and tell them, hey, this is a great technology, this technology works because of this and that and that. it's provably secure, it has all these great properties. yeah, and if you want to spread something, people have to know about it. So, so that's why I thought That's the one reason, that's the like Bitcoin intrinsic reason. The other reason is that I'm interested in education in general. if you, if you look at my past, I've been working in the university, I've been working as a high school teacher, I've been doing voluntary teaching for high school students, for highly gifted high school students, basically every summer. and already while working in the university, I have been doing a lot of YouTube videos, well, actually not on YouTube, but on Wikimedia Commons, to, to educate my students And it was kind of natural for me to, to continue on there, but just with the Lightning Network.

Fantastic. And then, do you work in-- still as a teacher a-and do Bitcoin and Lightning stuff on the side, or are you doing that full time now?

No, I'm doing this full time right now. the thing is that with this like, freedom point of view that I definitely share, working in a school in Germany was really hard for me. There's way too much rules, way too much- Regulation, if you might wanna call it like this, and, I personally think it's, it's very bad for the students, and at some point in time, I realized, I can't be part of the system that doesn't work unfortunately. I tried to be part of it, and I tried to like change it at least in my classroom to some degree, but, to give you an example, I didn't require my students to do homework, and I didn't require my students to like sit on a certain spot, and I- I was basically saying, you know what, we have like one month of time and we need to like know this, this amount of stuff because then there's the test going to be, and students could in group just like work together and try to like learn this stuff, and then at some point in time the principal was looking at my, class and he was like, "This is amazing, in a math class I've never seen more than ninety percent of students in group work, working concentrated on, on this stuff." And I'm like, "Yeah, this is great, isn't it and this is not good. They all need to have the same entry in their schoolbooks or in their, in their notes because otherwise, the parents can sue us that we didn't teach this to them and so on and so forth, right? So even though it doesn't make sense to force students to all have the same like notes from the blackboard, we must do this, and, and I mean that's stupid.

Yeah, I think it's similar to this idea that nowadays some teachers have to, they're forced to teach to what, teach to the exam rather than letting the child naturally pursue their interests and sort of learn in that fashion and trust that if the child comes across a topic where they need to learn something, that they will go and learn that. Do you have any com- comments on that?

No, I agree with you. I think especially education has to come out of curiosity. You can't force somebody to learn about fractions, right? But you-- and, I mean, this is what the school system basically does. It says, "You know, there's going to be an exam, and you have to pass the exam, because otherwise you have to take the class again, and then your parents are going to be mad." every time I, I had to make grades and give out marks, students were so afraid, some would like be afraid to go home. Like Not even the students with the worst mark, sometimes a good student getting an average mark would be afraid to go home. And, learning is an emotional thing, and you don't like learn with fear. I mean, yeah, you remember some stuff, but you remember the bad stuff. So you have to create an open environment, you have to create curiosity, right? So this is much more how I understood myself in the classroom, and it's also how I try to understand myself, on my YouTube channel with Lightning, where I'm trying to, ask in- Interesting questions or try to like point out interesting topics and hope that people are curious about them and say, "Hey, you know what? I really wanna know this."

Yeah, fantastic. I like that approach. So tell us a little bit about the response that you're getting with your YouTube and you're asking those interesting questions.

Yeah, it's very, positive to most degree. So if I go to meetups or conferences, people like come and say, "Hey, I watch your YouTube channel, it's really great, and I like it." also on Twitter, people are giving Getting positive feedback on it. it happens sometimes that, you know, my video doesn't have the best format. so for example, last week I posted one of my videos on Reddit because I thought this is, nice to share. Like, I don't post every video on Reddit, and then people were like, "Yeah, it's a little bit too long, and you do a little bit too much of self-promotion in it." And, you know, it's, it's, it's hard to find the exact format because what I definitely learned is if it Interesting, you have to be a little bit personal. So I'm still trying to, to figure this out and, then last week I did this crowdfunding campaign, and that was really astonishing for me. there's, I think currently twenty five people who put together about five hundred bucks or already more than point one Bitcoin, so that I can buy a document camera, which is heavily needed because, some of the stuff I can explain much better on a sheet of paper, and there you need a camera to like film this in a good way. I used to- I have one with my own employee, but, I'm not working there anymore. So, yeah, that is, that is great, and that shows me that there is actually some interest and that people, do receive this very well. What it also shows, though, is that the Lightning Network is still very much unknown, because if you, if you look at the channel, it's still very small, right? Because just not so many people are looking for the Lightning Network in general.

Yeah, and then it's an interesting point you raise around crowdfunding. Do you have any thoughts on the, you know, the way that educators in this space can fund or support themselves? For example, do you think it's a matter of making a product that people have to, you know, to pay to, you know, to use and that helps sustain you guys, the educators?

Yeah, that's, that's a very difficult question, I would say. I mean, let's, let's talk about the obvious ones, right? You can enable advertising on YouTube, but that doesn't pay you very well unless you have like really, really large channel. and the other one is you can do product placements and have sponsors for videos, but that is also a little bit critical because there might be some influence on your content, and education shouldn't be influenced by others, but it should really be about the topic, and hopefully you want to trust the ed- educator, that the educator has a good understanding of what's going on and does a good selection for you. so, so these two are a little bit difficult, I would say. Then if you do crowdfunding, for example, I would say it's very hard. Not many people are willing to, pay for something that, especially on the internet, people have this feeling stuff should be for free. we were talking about this like intellectual property thing with the Pirate Party, where we were asking like, do we actually have a stand on intellectual property or do we think everything should just be like universally accessible? and then what you can do is you can have indirect business models where you say, "You know what? if a company comes and they think that I'm a good educator and they want to do a workshop with me, then you can sell this content." Which to some degree is ridiculous because the content is already out for free on the internet. And yes, I mean, then you can go to Coursera and make a paywall for this, but for political reasons, I wouldn't do this. I think education and information should actually be, accessible for anyone. society Educated. if you, if you look at, people who struggle, who, who work in like difficult jobs, like working for Amazon and, and, packing the packages or stuff like this, it's usually people who have a poor education and bad educational background. So I think in order to flourish as a society, we, we need to educate people.

What about the types of people who come to your channel or to give you comments on it? What sort of people are- Are they, are they tinkerers? Are they early adopter types? Tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, to be honest, I don't quite know. Especially in the YouTube comments, many people are very silent, which to some degree is a pity because, also for the YouTube recommendation engine, YouTube measures how many comments you get. but I guess this is this high need of privacy in the Bitcoin space where people might even not have, a YouTube account, but just like anonymously surf on the internet, maybe even via- Sorry to watch the video. So, so I don't get this feedback exactly, my feeling is that there's a lot of, early Bitcoin adopters and enthusiasts who are currently interested in this. and I started this week to actually tag my videos to say, well, I have beginners' videos that are basically for everyone who is just interested in this, then I have expert videos that is, and, and enthusiasts that are people who already have interacted with Bitcoin a lot and maybe already Lightning, and then I have videos where I target developers. Right? Because there, there is a broad audience, and I want to teach some stuff to developers, but I also want to, like, teach the average Joe and tell them, you know, what the Lightning Network is really an amazing invention. I mean, if you, if you think about it, you're in Australia right now, and I could send you, a sub cent amount or just a few satoshis, and you would be able to receive it within a second, maybe, and you would technically have it in your pocket, right? I mean, you could close your channels, and

It's insane. Yeah,

it's fantastic. on the topic of different types of videos, what sort of videos of yours have you noticed where you got a big interaction with them or, you know, high viewership on those videos?

basically the ones that I posted on Reddit. If you, if, no, that's, that's really true. I, I would, I would say once a video is posted on Reddit and makes the, the, the Reddit Bitcoin sub, then, I mean, a lot of people at least- At least click it and then some subscribers come, so yeah, that is something that happens. But I mean, I don't wanna go out and, and post every video that I do on Reddit, to some degree I also rely on my viewers. I mean, if they think that the content is, valuable and worthwhile sharing, they can do this, right? Also, what I realized is that the topics that are a little bit, more polarizing or lighter to consume receive a little bit more traffic. For example, I have this one video where I, have recorded myself twice and discussed myself with, me as a lightning expert and me as a B-casher, and we're, we're discussing, how to scale Bitcoin, and, I mean, later on, I jump in as a data scientist and basically give some arguments. Why increasing the block size doesn't scale Bitcoin, right? It would increase the performance, that's true, but at some point in time, you, you couldn't go over a certain, size of blocks, right? So you need a different solution. yeah, so, so I try to make this a little bit more funny, right? I mean, I could give this technical argument right away, but I try to like make it easy to digest.

Yeah, the ease of, ease of listening is definitely helped when there's, you know, comedic value to it or some kind of interesting element to how it's presented. So I can definitely appreciate that. so Renee, yeah, but that's

the tension too, right? Sorry, that, that's the tension too, right? Because sometimes the comedian value is maybe a little bit too much, right? I mean, it's also a very, intimate thing that you like might show some emotions in a very, I would say, professional- And technical setting, right? I mean, I'm not, a seventeen-year-old YouTube star, who wants to get like every click for every, like, screaming into the camera or whispering into the camera or, or doing something like that. and then of course, as I said before, there are some people who are like, "Yeah, but it's a little bit too personal." So, so I'm still like trying out with the format and trying to find the sweet spot that is required there.

Yeah, I totally agree, totally agreed. I think it's a certain

And ultimately it's about trying to find a way to reach them in a way that's engaging, but without being too over the top, let's say. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah, okay. so let's now talk about Lightning Summit. So, before we kind of go into that, maybe just for the listeners who aren't aware, can you tell them what is the background on Lightning Summit?

Yeah. So, when, when you look at Bitcoin, I start with Bitcoin, there was this group or person, Satoshi Nakamoto, posting a white paper, and people were basically asking in this first thread on the mailing list, that the white paper is nice, but it lacks some details, and if Satoshi Nakamoto could draft out a spec, like a specification. And Satoshi Nakamoto, said, "Yeah, I could do that, but I'm much better with code than with words." so I have basically already implemented this before I have written the white paper. the implementation is currently a little bit dirty, I wanna clean this up, but I will publish the code and the code should be a reference implementation of what I'm proposing. And with the Lightning Network, it kind of worked the other way around. People sat together and said, "You know what? Let's back this out. Let's really create, RFC-style Git repository where we-- so RFCs, Request for Comments, is basically how all the internet protocols have been drafted. where we make a specification and then people can do implementations of this." And, that happened Two to three years ago, basically. And in this first specification, my feeling is-- I mean, I wasn't there, but my feeling is people have agreed to make a very small specification, to have like a very basic functionality, so you have like construction of payment channels and you have routing. But you need a couple more features to have a Lightning network that really works well, right? Currently, we have the situation that payments sometimes don't get routed through or that payments get stuck. And, a lot of these problems can be solved if we would have a better specification. So the idea of this Lightning Developers Summit was to draft, the second version of the specification, right? Because there are a lot of proposals and ideas out, and people had to agree what they want to have in the second, spec. That was the idea of the meeting.

Yeah, fantastic. And I know this was quite a small meeting. It was something like two or three representatives from each implementation plus a few other select representatives. Representatives, and you were one of the guys who was selected to attend. So tell us how you got that opportunity to attend, and I understand you collaborated with Rusty.

Yeah, I'm not sure if I could even say I collaborated with Rusty. I mean, I have been looking at the C Lightning source code, and I have done a few small patches, I would say there are many people who have done much greater patches than me because I'm just not a C programmer. And, I mean, I have been probably doing some valuable contributions for the Lightning Network community, and what the people in the, in this, group thought is we need to have some onboarding process, right? You need to have new people also sitting at the table and see how this entire, process works. And I have the feeling, at least this is what one other person told me, is that my work in education is also something that this group is interested in, because they also see that some people need to, like, talk about the stuff and need to, like, explain this to other developers, because education also can obviously help to onboard developers. So, yeah, I have the mix, I have the idea it's a mixture of several things that, made me be invited to the meeting. and it was very difficult for me to attend actually. Actually, I mean, the people who went there were highly in the topic, very detailed, and working on this for a long time, and yeah, I was the newbie, I think it was one of the few meetings in my life where basically- would close my mouth most of the time and just listen to what people were saying and making notes and try to like also learn a lot from this.

Maybe you can just give us an overview of some of the topics that you spoke about.

Yeah. So, One, one general thing that was agreed upon is that for the Bolt one one, so a Bolt is basic of Lightning technologies, which is like the name for the specification of the Lightning network, and a Bolt one one means the second version because Bolt one zero is going to be tagged on the Git repository soon. And what we basically said is for Bolt one one, we only want to include features that don't require a base layer update. So for example, Christian Decker has written a really nice, Idea for L2 payment channels, which is a different mechanism of constructing payment channels, it would require a Bitcoin soft fork though. So we decided not to even touch this at all, even though it would have made a lot of other stuff simpler. So, so that was one, main, main decision there. And then there was a lot of like technical details being discussed that, I think are currently not worthwhile mentioning because, I mean, half of the points is basically like this, where it's just like fixing Some numbers or making stuff more consistent, among implementations, and that is just like some coordination effort that's, yeah, I mean, it's needed, but it's not so interesting. But then, but then, the interesting part starts where we actually, talked about additional features that should be included into the Lightning Network. one thing that many users requested are dual funded channels, because currently when you open a payment channel, you have to provide the funds for the payment channel. And then you can only send money, but you can't receive money. With a dual funded channel, if both parties agree to accept dual funded channels, you open a channel and your channel partner also brings some Bitcoin on the table, and then you have a channel that can already receive funds, which is nice. and we have agreed that dual funded channels should be part of the next, specification. which was actually very difficult to agree upon, because most people knew we want to have this. But it was very difficult to understand who should pay the fees, in which situation, because there's some game theory involved where you can basically trick people or you can make some attacks on the Lightning Network. another feature that in the beginning I thought is very boring, but nowadays is like my most favorite feature, the more I thought about this, is rendezvous routing. I think it's a proposal, at least on the mailing list, CJP came up with it. the idea currently in the Lightning Network is that routing is source-based and not best effort like, in the Internet protocol. So what this means is, when you want to pay an invoice, you have to like decide which part, sorry, you have to You decide which path through the light-lightning network you wanna take, and you construct the entire onion package, and then the onions are being forwarded at each hop. But with rendezvous routing, the person who wants to receive some money basically already creates an onion from some node to them, and tells the-- within the invoice, the, the person who's supposed to pay the invoice, you only have to construct your onion until this like rendezvous point, and from there on, the routing progresses And the question is, why do we do this? It doesn't really increase the ability to route payments, but it increases the privacy a lot, because then, it's not clear which node actually receives the payment. You can do some really crazy stuff with this. me personally, I think a lot about, custodial solutions for, making Lightning more adaptable by people, because it's a complex protocol and there will always be complex software to be run, and I don't think this is an option for everyone. And especially with the help of rendezvous routing, you can construct virtual nodes, virtual payment channels, and a lot of crazy stuff that really would help with adoption. and then I think the single most important feature that was agreed upon was the, base AMP. so AMP is atomic multipath routing, and the idea is that you can split up a payment. So currently, if somebody sends me an invoice of, let's say, a million satoshis, I have to find a path where everyone has a million satoshis to forward the payment, and maybe some channels just don't have a million satoshis on them. what I can do with atomic multipath routing is I can say, you know what? I make Like a hundred payments that have ten thousand satoshis, and I send them over different paths, maybe some paths are even the same. And I can like send all these like, smaller payments, and once the entire amount has been received, at the recipient, they release the pre-image over all the paths, and then the payment, got through. And that obviously increases the chance of successful payment. Sure, and

then I understand that there are different versions of AMP. Can you talk a little bit about those?

I was able to talk about those two months, sorry, two weeks ago. mainly I like forgot, like on purpose, forgot about them that we don't take nowadays. So we go for base AMP nowadays, which is basically the least complex way of doing this or the most obvious way of doing this. and we realized it still has atomicity, right? The idea of atomicity is that, either the entire payment goes through or nothing goes through, right? You don't want to be in the situation where you have to pay, let's, let's use the one million satoshis again, and, five hundred thousand satoshis go through, but the rest can't be routed, but the recipient has really already received five hundred thousand satoshis. I mean, what, what is the recipient supposed to do? Send half the product? That's, that's Either everything arrives or nothing arrives. and with BaseM we can achieve this and, that's, that's fair enough to say, right? And the others were basically, a lot more communication overhead to, To have, for example, a proof of payment included. I think the, the main reason why they were on the table is because Lightning Labs have implemented them already on a feature branch. And they were like, "Isn't this great?" But then people were kind of like, "Yeah, but this is so much overhead, and a lot of stuff is going to be easier when we get L2 and we go for Bolt two zero." So we, we kind of agreed, "Let's do a basic version now." And this is also how the name Base Amp came around. But I think currently, people are even discussing again to, to rename Base Amp to just Partial Amp, because it's basically partial payments.

Lots of changes, lots of changes. So then what? What's the approach with, okay, so let's say, something is agreed to go into the spec, into Bolt one point one. What's the proposed approach then from going from Bolt one point one to actually making it into, say, LND or into C-Lightning, and sort of what's the timeframes there?

I'm not sure if a timeframe was set. I think everyone who is implementing a Bolt, sets their own timeframes, and, I, I think that was not even closely part- Of the discussion there, and I think for a good reason, right? Because, it's, it's two different things. The one thing is what is a protocol that everyone agrees that they want to have eventually, or where, where they say our, implementation is BOLT one one compliant, right? I mean, this is something that the implementations have to claim at some point in time and can be tested against the other implementations basically, And that's on the protocol level, and what people do with implementations is basically their choice. So, I would say there isn't no particular timeframe for this. I mean, even if you, if you look at it, it will only be in a couple of Days or maybe weeks that we, tag the bold, one dot zero in the Git repository, because we now said actually it's already implemented everywhere and we now have this like, specification that was always like, still some kind of a working document where we say, "Hey, now this, this is going to be fixed and this is really the, one dot zero implementation." So I think with Bold One One it's going to be similar. we have agreed now which features should be in there and- I'm currently on the mailing list and in the Git repositories, people are drafting this out, and then there is feedback there, and for some drafts, people already have a feature branch and have implemented this, but it's a very dynamic process, right? But it's important to separate the specification from the implementation.

Yeah, excellent point. One other thing I was curious to ask you about is you're quite-- obviously, you're quite plugged in with the scene, particularly in Germany, with, you know, full mode Lightning and the Hack Day. Do you see a specific, what was it about Lightning that drew a lot of people rather than simply Bitcoin?

Oh, I don't know, I really don't know. So, I mean, maybe, maybe one thing is that, people have realized that Lightning is the solution to the scaling debate in Bitcoin. And, Yeah, I don't know. I mean, maybe, maybe the Bitcoin scene in Germany is already quite big, that at-- at least it's my feeling, and, I mean, Germany is a still very well-educated, country, and we have a lot of computer scientists and a good startup scene in Berlin, and maybe people there realize Lightning is important. But, I mean, I have to be honest, the Lightning scene is really small. Yeah, sure. I mean, some stuff looks much bigger on the internet than it really is. I mean, I would say nowadays I know most Something with Lightning, and to some degree, it's, surprisingly small. the, the only thing that is really astonishing there is that it's, that there's a lot of energy there and that there's also interest there outside of the scene. There's always new people popping up, new people starting to be curious, starting to be interested, and there's a company coming like, "Hey, we have been experimenting with this for a couple of months now." So, so I think people in general, not only in Germany, realize that Lightning actually is the answer. I mean, just yesterday I was in a, in a phone call with a company, and they basically, are a consulting company for payment providers, and they basically said, "We are interested in this entire crypto space, but what we realized is none of the blockchain solutions will ever be a payment system. They, they just don't work. Be it Bitcoin, be it Hyperledger, be it Ethereum, whatever, it just doesn't work. Even the solutions that IBM are producing, they, they, they don't scale, right? " And they were very interested in the Lightning Network because they realize the Lightning Network is actually the first time that within this entire crypto space a solution is coming that might actually be, a regular payment system. And this is also something where banks might be afraid of or, or might start to be interested in, right? I mean, this is always the same, it can be an opportunity and it can be a threat.

Yeah, exactly. So I suppose, do you notice any real differences then between, let's say, the Balthor community and the Bitcoin community, or is it just that the Balthor kind of- Lightning community is just younger.

Again, I, I have to say I don't know because I have never been in the Bitcoin community. Right? I got interested in Bitcoin in 2013, as I said, but, at this time I was a poor student. I wasn't even, able to, to like buy bitcoins in, in large orders of magnitude or so. And, I was just following this on the internet. So, so for me, the Bitcoin community always was just the, the Reddit Bitcoin sub, Reddit. and to me, I think it's, it's, There's a big intersection or overlap of these two communities. And also if you look and understand Lightning, I mean, it's basically Bitcoin. We, we do nothing else, we just use Bitcoin in a very smart way. You, you don't need anything additional. and Yeah, I mean, I just started to really meet people, be really vocal on the internet in, in June, July this year, and there I started with the Lightning Network community because my personal interest as a data scientist, who, who is also interested in, in scaling architectures, was just the Lightning Network, and maybe it's also because I think this is really the solution how we get adoption of Bitcoin, because, I mean, it's, it's really obvious. I mean, I, I don't wanna trash talk Bitcoin right now, but with Bitcoin on- On chain, you can do seven transactions per second, and that is nobody ever going to use as a payment system. It's actually really bad if you look at it. I mean, we had at least two times in history where Bitcoin adoption started to really like skyrocket. I think one was in late, two thousand and thirteen, and one was in late two thousand and seventeen, and both of the times, the blockchain got stuck, and then people were like, "Yeah, we can't use it." It's more store of value, it's, it's not a currency, it's not an e-cash system, right? And now the Lightning people are coming back and say, "You know what? It is an e-cash system. We just have to use it in the right way. Just don't do all transactions on the blockchain. Just use the blockchain if there is a misunderstanding." Right? So the blockchain, I compare it nowadays way more to a, a court system, right? You have your smart contracts, which are, your HTLCs, hash time lock contracts, and

For constructing a payment channel, and only if nodes disagree at some point in time for whatever reasons, the contracts are being published to the blockchain, and the block blockchain then, rules as a judge and says, "You get the funds," or "Somebody else gets the funds," right? And, and, and that, that is a good use of blockchain, right? the, the use of blockchain to store every transaction in the world publicly is a bad use of blockchain, I would say. Sure, sure. It's, it's actually really funny. I was, I was, I Talking to, a so-called Bitcoin maximalist, and they were like, "Yeah, but you know, with Lightning, your funds are stuck in Lightning channels," and I'm like, "Yeah, but I see it the other way around." With Bitcoin, your funds are stuck on the blockchain, right? They're much more liquid if they are on a payment channel, because they can flow around, you can make quick payments, and, and you have a lot of like, flexibility. And only if your payment channels are closed, you are stuck on this like, slow and rigid blockchain technology, where if a lot of people want to use it, you can't use your funds because you have to pay fees that are so incredibly high, right? So, so for me, it's a much more nat- natural way to say I have my funds, liquid in the Lightning Network, and if they're not there, they're locked up in the blockchain.

Yeah, exactly.

But and, and that's, that's, that's, that's, that's very strange to a lot of people, right? And, I mean, maybe that's my advantage of being new to the field, of, of, of seeing it in this, perspective. Actually, I'm planning to do a YouTube video on, on, on this like point of view and, trying to discuss this

Hasher versus, lightning person one. Yeah, maybe. What about, so that's a, you know, probably a, an example of a misconception people have about lightning network. Are there any other common ones that you see?

I, I mean, one misconception that I frequently see is that people think when they put capacity on a channel, they can use the capacity in both directions, which to some degree will become true, with,

dual funding.

Dual funded channels, exactly. But currently it's just not like that, and in general, I mean, people have misconceptions already with Bitcoin, where They don't understand what a Bitcoin actually is. Right, for, for them, this is some value in the blockchain. They, they have the feeling that, a Bitcoin address is some kind of like an account, like the, the conception that people have of Bitcoin is much closer to how Ethereum actually works, where you have an address and then you have like really, an amount of like money that belongs to the address. But in Bitcoin, it's different, right? You have your unspent transaction outputs, and, and these are accumulated to Bitcoins that belong to an address. Address. And if you, if you don't understand this concept, you obviously also don't understand a lot of concepts that are in the Lightning Network, how is a payment channel actually really being constructed? and yeah, I think there are some misconceptions. Also, yeah, maybe, maybe a bigger one is actually this entire idea. Maybe it's my misconception, but I, I pretty much disagree with everyone, so, so it could be my misconception. Come on. but, people are always talking about rebalancing their pay- Payment channels. And to me, that doesn't make sense at all, because you, you are just like floating around money from one side of the pocket into the other. and if you look at the mathematical description of such a network or of such a graph, the only metric that is interesting for you is what is the max flow min cut property. And when you rebalance your payment channels, the max flow min cut doesn't change at all. technically speaking, if you have, And routing, it, it doesn't change anything if you rebalance your channels. That's something that, that I-- Maybe, maybe I'm doing a mistake here, but everyone is like, "Yeah," and then you have to rebalance channels all the time, you have to wonder about this, and I'm like, "No, you just have to have a good understanding of the topology of the graph and what's going on there."

Right.

And yeah, that is, that is also something that was discussed a little bit on, in the Australian meeting, is how much privacy can we allow ourselves to I mean, currently the Lightning Network is designed with an incredible, incredible amount of privacy, even in, in some detailed points like how the onion routing works, I mean, they're basically using this, mix network technology from the Sphinx paper. It's, it's an incredible thing that they also are aware of stuff like this. but the question is, at some point in time, if I want to be successful with routing, if I want to be successful with paying people, if I want to have good autopilots, I might need to know a little bit more about channel balances. and the channel balance means how is the capacity in the channel split up between the two peers. but obviously if you share this information, it's a huge intrusion into people's privacy. So I think currently the approach is try to be as private as possible, and if we see that this doesn't work, we can always drop the privacy property a little bit,

right, drop it a little bit progressively each time until you get to a point where Routing is more fe- feasible, let's say. And actually, that brings up the question then as well. So some people have tried to say, "Look, it's technically not going to be feasible because routing might be difficult once the network gets larger and larger." Is that a concept that was discussed or something you've thought about?

I don't think so. I also think that people who understand what a network is don't see this problem. because if you, if you look at complex- Networks and complex networks being, a technical term here. I mean, you can look up the Wikipedia article for it, for example. You will see that most networks that, people create, have certain properties in the sense of they are scale-free, they are small-world networks. What this means is that the diameter of the network is very small, and the diameter is the longest shortest path, which sounds a little bit paradox, but, but let me explain it. when you, when you calculate the short- This is part between two nodes, you have a certain length, and when you do this for all pairs of nodes, you take the maximum here. And if you look at, for example, the social network graph of human beings, I think it's well known that the diameter is five, so you know every other human being in the world by going over five. This is like

the five degrees or six degrees of separation.

Exactly, exactly. I, I think the original paper was six and nowadays we know it's more like five. I think on the Facebook graph it's even like four. It's, it's incredible actually. in the strongly connected component, I mean, obviously there are people who make just like, one hundred accounts with just one friend and where they're like Making artificial long diameter, but if you look at the real network, it's, it's more like, four or five. and if you have this in the-- it's, it's, it's very natural to assume, and you can already see this, that a similar topology will arise in the Lightning Network. Actually, if you look at the autopilot that, Rosebeef implemented in LND, it will actually enforce such, topology. that's the reason why he chose this algorithm and thought it was a good choice. And when, when you have a graph where you can reach every other node with just a few hops, and there's already multiple paths between two nodes with such, w-with only a few hops, then there's no problem with, with, routing being too complicated or complex in a large network. This will only be an issue if the diameter of the network would be like a hundred or a thousand, then of course you have like a lot of hops in between. But also if you look at the protocol, the onions can never be longer than twenty hops. It's by protocol design, you can never- Like rolled over a longer route.

Got it, got it. And then I think that also, the other question I had was around UI and UX. Now I know you've commented around this concept about things like not showing the channels to the front end user, because obviously that's a bit of a technical detail. but I suppose there is some challenge there because if people don't understand, until you have dual funded channels, then people might get a little confused.

Yeah, so what I would say is currently the light- Lightning network is just for highly technical people at this point in time, right? I mean, look at this. Currently, you basically need to run a Bitcoin full node and you need to run your Lightning node. I mean, who's doing this? and there's a lot of burden on this, right? So either you're an enthusiast, you're really interested in this technology, or you're a technical person. I know that people are already working on prune nodes and on different solutions. I don't want to like, say, "Hey, this didn't happen," right? But, but basically currently it still boils down to it like you need the full Tech stack to, to, to run your node. if it's like this, no one is gonna use this. I mean, if you look at Bitcoin, I think the first Android wallet was designed in Room 77 in Berlin because people were sick of going to Room 77 with their notebooks in order to pay with Bitcoin using their full node. It's, it didn't make sense to them. And I think in Lightning the same will happen, and this takes a little bit of time. But once we have this, we don't need users to be aware of their payment channels, right? It's, it's already-- this is where actually the discussion came from, that currently, wallet creators have this problem of showing an entire balance, but some of the balance is a Bitcoin balance and some of the balance is like bitcoins locked on the Lightning network, right? And by the end of the day, if, if you think of a customer, or a user, they just want to know how much funds they have. They don't care if it's locked on Lightning. If it's locked on the blockchain, they just want to know if they have the funds and if they can pay and if they can receive money. That's, that's the only thing the average Joe or even my sister cares about. And I think we're going there, and I think, the Lightning Network is a very core and fundamental technology, and in the best case, people don't even realize they're using it. That's, that's my opinion.

fantastic.

But yeah, maybe I'm wrong.

No, I think I, I'm, I'm on the same side as At this point in the, in the cycle, we're still at the very tinkerer enthusiast only stage. Okay, so Renee, have you got any other projects coming up or anything that you want the listeners to look at?

Yeah, I mean, I have been working on an own autopilot implementation because I think the one that LND uses isn't the best solution. and, the people from C-Lightning have already reviewed the code and they like it, they basically signaled that they want to merge it and requested a few more changes from my side, which I will do. but then, when I was in Chaincode Labs' Lightning residency, Christian Decker told me that there is the plug-in infrastructure coming to C-Lightning, and it really makes sense to me Make the Autopilot into, a C-Lightning plug-in. So this is something that, I will do hopefully in this month, that I will transfer my Autopilot to the C-Lightning plug-in infrastructure, and then the Autopilot for C-Lightning will be merged. And the nice thing about my Autopilot is that I try to like also separate this from C-Lightning so other implementations could use this or could extend this. I'm a Python programmer, and, you're probably aware of the fact That Electrum, which is like one of the largest Bitcoin wallets, has recently started to implement the Lightning Network for the Electrum wallet, and I've been in contact with them, and currently there is the idea that I might help a little bit. To improve the Electrum implementation of the Lightning Network. Maybe I would also bring the autopilot over there, but I think that's, that's very nice and obviously I want to continue my, educational involvement, with, with the Lightning Network, also becoming a little bit more technical again, doing a little bit more stuff for developers. So, once I manage to transfer the autopilot to the plug-in infrastructure, I will definitely do a video about this. And, yeah, I mean, I'm currently tinkering if I could actually even do more than one video per week, for my YouTube channel. But it would really be nice to, like, have a more substantial- Sustainable sponsorship then, and to like put this on a good funding level for me, because also I have to live from something. Sure, sure, absolutely.

So tell the listeners where they can find you in terms of YouTube and Twitter.

Yeah, they can, I mean, I think, just entering my name in, YouTube will work, it's Renee Pickhardt. I think you will probably link this also below the podcast. And my Twitter handle is the same as my GitHub handle, is also Renee Pickhardt. It's the same as my website Usually the, the, the hustle is to spell my last name correctly, but since on the internet you can have links, it's fair enough and working.

Yeah, no, that's, I think that's fine. Absolutely, for the listeners, make sure you check the show notes page, and I'll put the link for Renee's YouTube and Twitter there, so make sure you check that out. Renee, any parting comments?

I think people should look at the Lightning Network. It's, it's really something that can't be ignored and shouldn't be ignored. my feeling Lightning Network is our chance to make Bitcoin, really the currency of the internet, because currently, I'm afraid to say, this Bitcoin isn't the currency of the internet. It's a really nice idea, it's a really nice thing to like be involved in and, and be around. But if we want to have everyday payments, micropayments, and all of that stuff, we, we need the Lightning Network. We don't need any other altcoin or shitcoin or whatever you wanna call it, but we need a payment process and, or payment protocol and that's the Lightning Network, so, so people should really put their emphasis on it.

Fantastic. Thank you very much, Renee. This has been a really great conversation.

Thank you very much for, as I said before, having the opportunity, and I also thought it was really, really nice,

thanks. Hope you guys enjoyed that conversation with Renee. Check out the show notes on my site stephanlivera dot com and follow me on Twitter, my handle is at stephanlivera. Thanks, guys. Speak to you next time.