Zeus: Self Sovereign LN Wallet

Hi and welcome to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics. Today for episode three hundred and seventy-six, my guest is Evan Kaloudis, and we're talking about Zeus, a self-sovereign Lightning wallet that you use to connect with your own Lightning node. So we're talking about building Zeus as a FOS app, getting support and feature bounties, the Zeus community, having- Interoperable standards in the Bitcoin and Lightning community, supporting different Lightning implementations, as well as the future of Lightning privacy, and we also get into some discussion about payment reliability for the self-sovereign Lightning node user. This show is brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Swan Bitcoin makes it easy for you to buy and also learn about Bitcoin, and for those of you who want to give the gift of Bitcoin to your friends and loved ones, swanbitcoin.com/gift is the site for you. You can give a gift with a custom message, your recipient will get an email and they can claim that. They create their SWAN account and they convert that USD value into Bitcoin. And remember, you're not just giving Bitcoin here, you're also giving them the gift of SWAN's world-class education and customer service and support. So that website is swan dot com slash gift. Do you need some fiat liquidity without selling Bitcoin? Lend at HoddleHoddle can help you. This is a peer-to-peer Bitcoin-backed lending platform, so you are basically putting your Bitcoin into an overcollateral Loan, and you're getting stable coins for this, and then at the end of that loan, you repay the stable coins with the interest, and then you can get your Bitcoin unlocked and sent back to you, and you still hold one key out of three during this time period, and you can know that your coins aren't being re-hypothecated. So with lend at HodlHodl, this is done basically using offers. So you can go to the website, you can see the offers that are there, whether you wanna lend or borrow, and you can see the different interest rates on offer And you can then create an offer or accept an offer that's there on the page. So go to lend dot h o d l, h o d l dot com. Are you involved with Bitcoin mining? Brains are a Bitcoin mining company through and through, and if you have Bitcoin mining equipment, you need to check out whether Brains OS Plus is supported for that device, because if it is, you can increase the hash rate on your Bitcoin ASIC, you can improve your efficiency as much as twenty-five percent, and you can use it to mine on any pool, or if you point your hash rate towards Sl Using BrandOS Plus, you get zero percent pool fee, so there is a dev fee for Brand-BrandOS Plus, but you are having the benefit of zero percent pool fees. So go and check out the site, you can see which models are supported, such as the Bitmain S19, S19 Pro, S19J, S19J Pro, T19, some of the S17 models, and in the pipeline, they've got Whatsminer M20S and some other Antminer X19 models coming. Also on the Brand site, you can find a Education. So go to brains dot com, that's b r a i i n s dot com. And now onto the show with Evan.

Evan, welcome to the show. Hey, Stefan. thanks for having me. It's, it's quite a privilege and an honor. Hey, man, the

pleasure is mine. The, creator of my Lightning wallet, it's always a pleasure to talk to my Lightning wallet, Mr. Zeus himself. So, yeah, man, look, tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into Lightning development and- Particularly how you got into starting Zeus, which is, one of my go-to Lightning wallets.

Awesome. yeah, so probably got into Bitcoin space around twenty fourteen. So like my last year of college, I was studying CS, and, from there, just following Bitcoin pretty intently, and after using it, after, you know, getting acquainted with the mempool, our restrictions on block space, just how the whole payment flows work, it became pretty obvious that, you know, Doing on-chain transactions wasn't gonna scale to the whole world, and we'd need better solutions. So, when I finally heard about Lightning, a lot of things clicked, it made, made a lot of sense. A lot of the properties it brought to Bitcoin were super exciting to me. You know, it took a little while to get everything spun up, but, you know, as soon as I, I could pragmatically do it, I spun up my own Lightning node and got my hands dirty with that. So, started with my own little setup with LND on my computer, My, my Raspberry that I had sitting in my drawer and put it all on there, and I actually did the, the Raspberry bolt, guide that Statikus, put together, and that was my first little, self-sustained, little node. And, yeah, from there I went onto like Raspberry Blitz to get those community updates, but, you know, I, I really had a great time, like, just seeing how fast the transactions were going through and getting settled. I mean, it took a little time of playing around, But ultimately, I realized, you know, it's great to be able to do these lightning transactions, from my desk, but ultimately where this thing is really gonna shine is out on the go, in person, and, in retail and being able to do those instant payments. So I had started building up this node, and I, I had this basic functionality I wanted to, to bring, a-and basically I hadn't never done a mobile app before, so this is my first, like, real one I-I've shipped. I-I've worked on some small ones, but, Did a lot of front end stuff the couple years before that, and I got really well acquainted with React, and I'd heard about React Native, this mobile framework equivalent that lets you spit out binaries for Android and iOS, and I figured this would be the perfect A project to sink my teeth into it with. So started with basic functionality, just being able to send, receive, on-chain and on LN. And, you know, as I built up my little node, I wanted to be able to manage it on the bus as I was going into work to my cyber job, so I wanted functionality to look at my channels, open new ones, see how, if I was, you know, routing any, if at all, like back in the day was nothing, especially just on my little Pi with Tor.

Yeah, and just to be clear, 2018, 2019, or where, where are we at this point?

yeah, so it has to be like 2019. So, the app came out-- or, well, it, it got published, February or, or March of 2019. So we're, we're three years deep into this right now. So yeah, so like winter of, of 2018 is like when I was like really starting to mess around with stuff, and, yeah, I was just going on,

SLP, sometimes TFDTC, and then, going home in the evenings and, you know, hacking on this app, really just to scratch my, my own itch. So, to A, learn this new framework that, you know, I'd heard so much about, but B also to, you know, just suit my own needs. And, and now we've got, you know, a, a significant amount of the Lightning Network, at least in public capacity terms, using the app, and, i-it's quite incredible.

Yeah, so I mean, my experience was, I think I stumbled across it online, obviously, 'cause we were all kind of in this little Bitcoin Twitter echo chamber, and then I found it, and then I was like, I think I started using it around 2019, and probably mid or a bit late 2019, 'cause I, I remember using it actually when I was going to the Lightning conference, the first Lightning conference in 2019. And so I remember using it, and I, at that point, I had a MyNode set up, and I had Zeus connected to my own MyNode back home. And to me, it was just crazy because back then, I was halfway across the world in Germany, sending and receiving Sats, and it was all running off MyNode halfway in the other side of the world, over in, in my, you know, living room in Sydney. And it was just like, that was just mind-blowing to me, you know? That was so crazy to me. And, you know It really felt like living in the future because you could just go to merchants, merchants, right? And you were buying ice cream or buying a beer or things like this, and, you know, and it just really felt magical and like that was, you know, and now, like, we take that for granted at Bitcoin conferences now that you can just pay and receive in Lightning.

Yeah. So I, I actually remember Lightning conference, or at least I remember watching you post the videos and I'm like, "Wow, Stephan Livera is using my wallet," and it was like the cocktail machine, Like when you pick the mixed drink and it dispenses it for you for like a dollar, like crazy rates. Yeah, that was really awesome to see just, you know, popping by in my feed. So that was quite an amazing moment. But, yeah, there's that magic when you actually, you know, do that transaction in, in the real world and, you know, get tangible goods or, or services for it, and it just confirms, like, before your eyes, a lot of those moments in Miami, for the conference, when was it last month?

Yeah, for sure. For sure. So, I mean, it's,

it's really cool to see a lot of vendors starting to, accept it. It's becoming, it's becoming a real tangible thing now, which is great.

Yeah. And I, I mean, I'm glad to see that, right? Because I think a few years ago, I would have been more focused on hodling, right? But nowadays, I actually, I do see a value more to building this so-called circular economy. I think it's more of an ideological focus, but I believe it makes The whole system more robust, right? Because if there are more easy ways that you can earn and spend, and, you know, I, I see more value to that idea, so, you know, I'm definitely hopeful to see more of that, even if I still believe hodling is most important, I still wanna see some, you know, some, circular economy.

Well, Stephan, you gotta, you gotta, you gotta hoddle your money first to be able to, to spend it, right? You know, that's, that's step one, right? Yeah, Because, well, first and foremost, I, I think Bitcoin, is on a, a quite solid trajectory. Don't get me wrong, there's still lots of ways for it to, to fail, go but up, to get captured. And, I, I have a bit of a fear of, you know, the predominant way people use in the, the future is through these, you know, these neo banks of sorts or on these custodial rails. And, you know, when, when those institutions are, are the predominant way Bitcoin gets used We lose, we lose a lot of its benefits, right? We lose its censorship resistance, right? we lose, the supply cap in, in some ways, right? That people can do these paper-like claims that we have, that we see today in like gold markets or whatever. And, and yeah, I mean, part of building Zeus is, is trying to give people those tools to, to be able to do Bitcoin in this self-sovereign way. So, I, I have no doubt that Bitcoin and Lightning even will continue to come even more pervasive in our You know, even existing payment platforms, especially with stuff like Taro just down the road, you know, we could end up seeing this stuff in, you know, anywhere, everyone from, from Venmo to, to traditional banks, and, and I think that's gonna be the way a lot of people get onto Bitcoin, you know, for better or worse. But, I, I wanna make sure that Zeus is always there, available for people, for when they're ready to take things, or if they're ready to take things into their own hands and take that personal responsibility and, Properties that it, it gives you.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean, there's different ways to use Zeus, right? Like you can do the home node, in some cases, like for me, I have a VPS where I use my BTC Pay, and that's how I connect my, my Zeus to my LND on that. So that's another way people can use Zeus. And I think Zeus is known for being the more full node wallet a, aspect. So that- Are you planning to keep that aspect of it, or are you actually thinking about light clients and light wallets, as well, or are you thinking, no, this needs to be the, the hardcore full node wallet?

So there's definitely a lot of interesting stuff going on in the space to make it more feasible for, you know, people to have, you know, good experience, good user ex-experience when with light clients and whatnot. Ultimately, what I've decided as far as Zeus is that Zeus is gonna remain a remote-only app. I definitely am looking into some ways to- To provide like client experiences to people, but I think that'd be best suited for a second app. We want to make sure that Zeus users can continue using it the same way they always have, and that that binary stays as light and, and compact as possible. It's already a pretty big app, considering all the React Native stuff. We don't wanna end up throwing a hundred megabyte binary on top of that in there for users. But at the same time, I believe there's a room for us to have perhaps a second app Have the node running on there and users having a quite comparable experience that they would have, using the standalone app versus using Zeus. And, you know, perhaps, we can even have some sort of bridge where we encourage people to look into, you know, all the different options available to them, educate them on some of the perks that they would get having their node somewhere else other than their phone, and, you know, encourage people to upgrade if that works for them.

Yeah, gotcha. And I'm curious as well how- How much of it is like an educational journey as well? Like, let's say somebody who is a new Lightning user, they sort of install the app, like, would you look at maybe-- I mean, I guess there's different ways you could go. Like, as an example, let's say something like a Voltage dot cloud or something like a Greenlight, and could it sort of spin up, or could there be kind of ways that you could connect in the background to sort of set that up? Or maybe, like you're saying, that would be for another app, but it kind of, like

So with, as far as the, the cloud services go, they're very interesting and I, and I'm g-grateful that, people are experimenting with them, offering up great solutions for people to get these very well connected nodes that are really ideal for, you know, enterprise and, and retail and, and all this stuff. That, that's great, but I don't think that's necessarily the primary focus of, of Zeus. I, I really want people to take as much of that, you know, control into their own hands. so I think a- The secondary app would have a focus with the node being on-device, but have that extra lift that help being perhaps from some sort of LSP services. Gotcha. I'm really intrigued by, what can be done with PTLCS and, you know, the enhancements there that can allow users to accept payments when they may not be online. I think that's the biggest challenge that we have ahead for us as far as that mobile LN experience. It's not never great to be like, "Oh, I want to get a payment, oh, he's not online." And he's gotta open his phone up and make sure he's online, but oh wait, now he doesn't have, his blocks in sync and he's gotta wait another five minutes. Like, those are all not great things. If you could pass over your payment to an intermediary in a trust-minimized fashion, and when they're ready and all synced back up to the lightning network graph, then, be able to accept that last HLC and get your payment in, I think that would be a, optimal solution.

Yeah, yeah. And there's been lots of ideas in the The, Roy and the Breeze guys were talking about this i- this idea of huddle invoices, but then there was a critique of that leap, meaning it's a long lived HLC and it's locking up liquidity across the network, and so there was kind of argument about that. And I know, Matt Corallo came out with a new idea as well about offline payments, but I haven't looked into the detail of it yet, so I wouldn't better speak to it.

Yeah, yeah, Bloombit posted on the mailing list, I believe, in October.

he That handoff of, of a payment to a user when they're offline and, yeah, it's, he seems to hit on P2C's potentially giving us that functionality and an LSP that's plugged into the user's light client mobile app and just holding onto that payment until they're ready to phone in and have it passed off to them. So, you know, definitely not as trust minimized as perhaps, you know, being online all the time, but, you know, a solution with acceptable trade-offs in my opinion.

Yeah, for sure. and so the other thing Zeus is known for is being a bit of a, a cross implementation wallet, right? Because you support LND and Core Lightning, which used to be called C-Lightning, just for some listeners who don't know. So can you tell us a little bit about your, about your experiences there? Has that been more difficult to try to support across different implementations?

Oh, certainly. I mean, so Zeus supports, something like five different APIs. So we have LND, C-Lightning or- Or core lightning through C-Lightning REST or Spark APIs. They haven't had their own in-house API until just the very latest release, and we'll be looking at that, it's a CLNGRPC API. So, yeah, speak on that real quickly. We're really excited about that because that's gonna just ship with all the new features that come with C-Lightning. So we're not gonna have to depend upstream for C-Lightning REST or Spark to, you know, get new features implemented. So we could potentially be getting C-Lightning features into Zeus much more quickly. So It's got support for L and D, see Lightning, Eclair, and then L and D Hub. so that's what BlueWallet uses, but it's also been used by a lot of different apps like L and Bits, so you can potentially host an instance for friends or family. Let's say you want them to have access to funds on Lightning, but the funds are segregated, but that you don't necessarily want them to worry about, liquidity or channel management. That's a pretty good Uncle Jim solution. So, you know, although that's custodial, I think that fits into Zeus still. So, so yeah, as far as, so as far as implementing all of them, there's, it's been quite challenging because not only is the functionality across all the implementations different, with, you know, a lot of divergences coming up, some implementations having new features, you know, ahead of others, and like bolt twelve, for example, in seel lightning or s-l-n, but also the API is having- Quite a bit of a divergence, the format in which each piece, piece of data needs to be passed in to do every operation, you know, is, is quite different. So what we've had to do is orchestrate, and design Zeus in a way that we could abstract all the different calls out from each of the different APIs and, detail how they should be called and with what bits of data, but also by putting different flags on those API, im-implementation files and detailing what features are accessible to them so that When Zeus is rendering the interface for a user, they'll know, okay, like you can hide this, you can hide the channels tab for the LND hub users, they don't have access to that, for example. for sure. So, we've got a quite a good way of, of doing it. That, that being said, i-it's been quite a lot of work to make sure everything works smoothly together. So, you know, interoperability and, you know, supporting a lot of different implementations is, is definitely a lot of work, for sure.

Yeah I can imagine that over time, as they update things or maybe they deprecate some function in it, you know, they deprecate some API call, and then you're like, "Oh, okay, wait, what's the new thing? Okay, I need to..." That's, I can imagine,

yeah, I mean, versioning too, for sure.

Yeah. Like, oh,

this guy's got a newer version of LND, he shouldn't see this feature yet. Yeah, like that's another thing we've had to account for.

Right. Yeah, that's,

When new features were getting added at that rate, we're like, okay, we need to have a tag that says this feature's only supported after this release. And then we're like, oh, now they're deprecating stuff, now we need like a, a tail end flag, only support this after this feature. So we've, we've gone through it all, every which way, but, you know, now that, things have gotten a little more solid with most of these releases, you know, it's less hectic, but, you know, things still get API changes for sure. Yeah, gotcha.

Okay. And in terms of features and things like that, can you tell us a little bit about your journey there? Because there are all these kind of crazy, different features out there in the Lightning world. There's no top-down leader here. You just kind of see something and it becomes popular, whether that is LNURL, whether that is even, you know, Bib21, like, Miles Teter and the Cash App gang are, you know, big on Bib21. And, you know, and even inside-- Oh,

We're definitely very interested by the prospect of unified QRs, and, the only downside I can see to them is that you're cramming so much data into a singular QR, it can be difficult for older phones to, with, you know, not so great cameras to be able to read that data, it either takes longer or it's not so clear. so I think we're gonna support that, moving forward with options for users to just create singular u- QRs like the old way. And, that also gets mitigated a little bit by NFC, which we have in the app. So, tap to pay, people are pretty familiar with that, like Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, tap your credit card to pay in retailers. we've taken that for Scanning anything you would scan with your camera, you can do with NFC and Zeus.

Yeah, and that's fantastic because then it might really smooth the interface and things. Now, maybe the argument would still be, hey, some of those old phones don't have NFC or some like people who are less tech savvy, maybe they don't have NFC enabled or whatever, or maybe for, if they're security conscious, they've got it disabled for that reason. So, I mean, that too. But nevertheless, I think it provides another option and gives people choices in how they want to use Bitcoin, spend and Receive Bitcoin, so that's really cool. Also, I guess there are things with all these kind of new functionality, so LNURL is an example, and then within LNURL, there's different bundle, cat-categories as well, isn't it? There's LNURL Pay, Receive, Authenticate. So can you tell us a little bit about Zeus and LNURL?

Yeah, so LNURL is basically the spec on top of Lightning Network that uses HTTP requests, to serve up the data required for different operations. So let's say I wanna get an invoice from you, Stefan, and you're offline, 'cause our time zones are different. I could just query your lightning address or your LNURL, pay address, and that will do a call to your lightning node, fetch an invoice, and return it to me. And, yeah, and Zeus, we support all the main features of LNURL. the thing is that the LNURL spec is like constantly upgrading, and there are new improvements that people are proposing through these, I believe the L- UD improvement specs and, we're, we're not on top of all of them, but we do support all the main functionality. So LNURL withdrawal, like scan a QR code to trigger withdrawal to your node, that's awesome. LNURL channel to, get a channel open to you. LNURL pay to make a payment, fetches the invoice for you. And, LNURL auth, which is definitely an underrated one. So basically, you can scan a QR code to log into a specific website. Definitely an under- Stated feature there, just, you know, you have private keys on your lightning node, why shouldn't they be able to authenticate you? So very much looking forward to that feature being more widespread. I, I believe you could use on places like Ellen Market right now, Ellen Markets. Yeah. But, yeah, I, I think as we're exiting this era of, you know, traditional passwords and people are becoming more conscious of, of the risk there, I think, you know, login schemes like this make perfect sense for us to move to, especially if we're keeping such, well- Care of, of these keys because, you know, they, they control our finances. I, I think it makes perfect sense.

Yeah, for sure. and in terms of things like managing your relationship with LSPs, as an example, is that something where there might be more development on, on that pathway of how to, like, as an example, when you've spun up your node to, to be able to buy a channel from somebody, because the kinds of users who are using Zeus, they tend to be running like a bigger node, and so they would need to be doing Example might be, swap providers, right? So on-chain and off-chain swapping out, so being able to spend some on, on your lightning channel and then take it back on-chain. Are these, things you're looking at or how are you seeing that with Zeus?

yeah, so I wouldn't say that there's not going to be something that happens in the immediate future, but it's something that's on our radar. I would say moving forward, it's very likely that we'll have access to both services as well as different LSPs. And, I think we're actually quite early days with all that can be done with LSPs. I think it's very important that users have choice, and, and I think something we're doing really uniquely in the Lightning space, generally speaking, you know, there are outliers, is that we're letting users have access to all these different computing services, and ultimately the, the users are really gonna benefit from it. so traditionally in, in, you know, Silicon Valley VC culture, it's all about building these walled gardens gardens to keep the users in and close so that they don't go somewhere else to a competitor, they just keep coming back to you. And I think that when we're talking about an open monetary network like Bitcoin and, and, and Lightning, those same sort of mechanics aren't just not gonna fly, especially with users that are, you know, savvy and technical and actually doing stuff like managing their own channels, like they'll find a way to open that channel out via the, the command line if they really have to. So what I would really like to see is there to be some sort of convergence Of LSP standards and for there to be a lot of openness and compatibility across apps, so, you know, I should be able to, you know, pick between multiple different LSPs and even enter in a custom one and, you know, be able to compare their rates and, and their services and what they have to offer me. So, I'm really hoping that we see a future where you fire up your, your Breeze, your, your Zeus, whatever next wallet's gonna be, and, users have the option to use whatever makes sense for them.

Because, I mean, there's all these different things you wanna think about, right? It's how well connected is that LSP, what kind of upfront fee are they charging you, and then even on that channel, once they've sent it to you, if it's a channel, what is the routing fee they are charging?

Yeah, that's, that's absolutely right. And, and beyond that, Stefan, I would say that people's needs on the Lightning Network are, are quite different. You know, some channels might make more sense for some users than others, you know, depending on Like that cost of capital that you're putting up in that channel, and also what your economic relationships are with these parties. Like, are you, you gonna be sending money in that direction because you're buying something from them, or they're connected to someone that you're routing stuff through? there's like not really one size fits all solution For, you know, users in terms of like a certain set of channels or certain LSP services, you know, if you can put one together, like a, a general speaking one like Breeze or Phoenix makes, like you could definitely save upon fees if you were to, you know, put the channels together yourself. So, everyone is, is really different, so we, we need to provide all the options we can for them.

Yeah, absolutely. And so in terms of Zeus community, how has that grown over time? Have you had, A lot of contributors, a lot of people who are helping out, whether that's in, you know, the chat, or whether that's in development, or whether it's in support or anything like that.

Yeah, I mean, we've got quite a vibrant community now. A lot of our community is on Slack, so, not Slack, well, Slack, we have a developer set up, so we usually talk about all our PRs and, you know, our core of, of contributors are usually talking on there. But Telegram is usually where our, you know, users are. I don't know, something like twenty plus contributors, and I'd say about four or five of them are, are pretty frequent contributors or, you know, always check in on us once in a while. So like, Fiat Jeff, who's done a lot of stuff with Ellen URL, he's contributed some code for us, added implementation support for it, I believe. we've got, Paul Miller's written some code for us. We've got this, new great contributor, dregs, who's working over at Bitcoin Company right now. He's very active and has

Namely, our, our pin pads and decoy pin stuff, so that's been really awesome. But as far as, managing the project, it's me and Bosh. So Bosh came on, early last year, and I was got to reach, I got, reached out to by, Pavlenek from, he does a lot of stuff with BTC Pay server, and he told me that a new group was being spun up called Bitcoin Design Community, and they were looking for some partner projects to team up with. So he's like, in a, it I have, you know, Zeus is great, but it's ugly, and you need help, you wanna-- And you're like, I'm like definitely, I definitely don't have an eye as a designer. when I was working on front end stuff, I had a designer named Hector who I'd always worked with, and he was making stuff look pixel perfect, you know, before and after, and I was just putting the, the code together. So, yeah, that proved to be a really amazing collaboration, and, I can't sing their praises enough. So

The design lead on all the frames of the new Zeus redesign has also become a, you know, co-maintainer of the project, and he does sort of like a product manager role now. So that's been incredible. We've had, Steven Delorme, he did all our branding and provided a lot of, feedback to us that's been invaluable. And, you know, there's countless other people there that provided great feedback too. Tiana helped make our website, design our website. We got guys like Christophe and Johns who- For veterans that have also given us incredible, feedback and, you know, Connor too. So, you know, that's, that's definitely been a big part of the, the puzzle, and I'm forever grateful for those guys.

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So Zeus is always gonna be one hundred percent free and open source software, and we're gonna make sure we never ruin that part of it. That being said, moving forward, I am personally intrigued by different LSP services and making- The user experience for, newcomers much better. So I think we're, we're still, sort of early in, in this race, but I, I really wanna dive into it and, experiment with what we could offer up to our users. So, I'm not gonna say exactly when that will be in place or, or kick off, but it's definitely part of the plan. in the meantime, you know, Zeus is doing, perfectly fine as far as You know, just users, just throwing us a couple sats here and there. It's funny, like sometimes I'll pop open my, my node, my BTC Pay to see the invoices I got in, and, you know, sometimes people are just, they're so, sending me like two or three sats, which is so minuscule, but, you know, every sat that gets, gets into the project, that really means a lot to us, and we put to good use, whether it be, just making sure, you know, our, our servers are, are

Adds to a contributor to get a new feature in, and, we've had quite a lot of success with putting out bounties. So we, we've got a bounties page on Zeus, and, we, we actually got our first grant from Human Rights Foundation in twenty twenty, and, they gave us a full Bitcoin, and we put up the majority of that towards various bounties. So we put up five bounties, and each and every single one of them hit, and we've got varying new features from Eclair support To built-in Tor process into the app, which is now a free and open source library that other projects can use, and, and we've seen, you know, other projects like BlueWallet, and, I believe Blixt may have also used it too. I think the Hexe guys are, are in the middle of integrating that as well. So it's really sweet to see something that you helped fund, get used by other open source projects and, and bring a lot of value to the space. So, you know, I got a lot of issues with Tor It's definitely, like ninety percent of the questions people ask in our user chats, but at the same time, it really is powerful technology and, like you said, it's just magical when you get to connect back to your node on the other side of the planet, it's, indescribable really. Yeah, yeah.

Also, wanna chat a bit about, payment reliability as well as subjects like AMP and MPP. So what I'm seeing from some users is we get Some people who are-- and it's, it's a really weird thing for me because I see some users who are very like, "Oh yeah, I get most payments through, no issues," and then I've got others who are saying, "Nah, even-- I, I'm really struggling to get pa-payments through, even sometimes with the inner direct channel circumstance." I'm curious, and whether you are seeing this in your chats with other people who are just using Lightning Network generally, is it that, you know, people who are trying to be a self-sovereign Lightning node router, are Making larger payments from a, like, making payments reliable point of view.

So there's definitely a lot of challenges with reliability, in terms of lightning, especially if you're just getting started. And I think the number one misconception is, people trying to receive from a counterparty and they just have one channel and that channel is just like freshly opened. And, people don't realize that they need to have that information about that channel propagate over the lightning network's gossip network, for people to- to know, where it is, what connections it has, and how to make a payment to it. So I'd say that's number one. number two is people often not having enough channels or channels, that are not well connected to the middle of the network. They maybe just connect to a friend and think they're okay, but they're just a couple of raspis with not so great liquidity. but there's also just a lot of general challenges in the network as we're growing. we're growing at a clip. Like very quickly. And, there are definitely some challenges as far as, fee calculation. So in many cases, we have, operators that are advertising at one rate, they make an adjustment, and, you know, payments will begin to fail because the new rates haven't propagated through the gossip network. But also, there are some quirks between implementations and some scenarios where people are using zero fee routing. And shouts out to zero fee routing, he's a huge supporter, but I've heard That also causing problems too. So there's a lot of, points where there's definitely can be a lot of improvements as far as reliability. And, I, I think actually number one, beyond, you know, user education and knowing how, you know, the mechanics of the gossip network work, the liquidity work, I think our algorithms for pathfinding are really sort of novice right now, and I think a lot of enhancements are gonna be built upon them. A lot of that's probably gonna be due to, to Renee's work, if you've been following that with So I, I'm really looking forward to the implementation, really diving in and evaluating this, because it's only gonna become more challenging, I think, over time in, in some regards. certainly as the network grows, there's gonna be a lot of growing pains and a lot of room for, for denial of service attacks. So, let's try to get the routing optimizations out of the way first so that we can focus on other things as we're scaling up.

Yeah. And so, do you see it like that currently, portends or, Is pushing towards a more hub and spoke model or where it's becoming harder for that sovereign user per se, like who's not a big company, just like an everyday individual who wants to run his Lightning node, that it's, it's becoming more difficult or do you believe that, that will always remain feasible?

That's a great question, actually. I think naturally the network is always gonna have really big hubs on it, right? There's always gonna be the service providers, the big businesses, and they're gonna just have crazy connections. Like for an ex-example, like an exchange is gonna have crazy liquidity if it's well frequented. That being said, I think as long as we can find ways for it to be as, like, not super overbearing to be an operator as possible, I, I think then that, that's what's really gonna be most important. I, I think stuff like, you know, denial of service, like we were talking just a moment ago, I, I think that's gonna be a big challenge. Certainly, stuff like being on, on tour and, and having some degree of firewall is gonna We've got to think about how we construct the network moving forward, and stuff like onion messages could potentially add a really big burden on these operators and make it much more difficult if you're dealing with more traffic, that's more writes and reads from your node, it's gonna be using more space and logs, it's just, gonna be more difficult to reach you if, if a lot of people are trying to hit you too. So, you know, these are things we gotta be mindful of, of figuring out that balance of functionality that we want on the layer. And, you know, what the cost is. And, you know, that's not something unique to Lightning, we're, we're talking about stuff like CTV today and discussing the, the pros and cons of that and the benefits it adds versus, you know, operational costs it could add to people's, setups.

Totally fair. And, even on the zero fee routing thing, right? So I think people saw that on Twitter recently where I think Zero Fee Routing was making a comment about his, Channel DB getting really large, and then I think after that, I believe the Lightning Labs guys came out and said, "Oh yeah, okay, actually we were logging a lot because that we were trying to use that for errors and like troubleshooting and tech support." And so I think in the new release, I think they, they're doing a slightly less logging so that way the path

finding too, having past data to figure out the best routes moving forward. yeah, I mean it's-- there's a lot of just finding where the sweet points are in, in a lot of, This engineering at this point, figuring out, you know, what the optimal rate at which to do stuff at and where to put certain burden of things at, it's, definitely part of the growing pains of the network right now.

Yeah, and, also one other area, speaking of Renee Picard, do you have any thoughts on the whole zero base fee movement?

It's definitely intriguing, but, you know, I, I think there's definitely some impressive numbers that are being put out by guys like that that are, you know, just moving lots and lots of- Lots of volume, but, you know, for me, I, I think that, I value my capital a little bit more, and I, I think there should be some sort of base fee for that. But, you know, I'm, I'm not gonna judge others how they value their capital. So I'm, I'm very appreciative of all the experiments that are going on as far as, fee setting and trying to do, pathfinding and trying to figure out optimizations there. You know, I can't stress enough like the experimentation we're seeing Is great to see. It's, it's really imperative for growth trying to experiment on finding out what works and what doesn't. But, personally, I, I haven't been sold on the zero fee stuff.

Yeah, as in zero base fee, yeah,

yeah. zero, zero base fee, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so I, I think there's a few things around, I, I guess I hear lots of different things in the ecosystem, right? Because I, I'm personally more on the lightning bullish case, but I, I hear this sort of And you have to be bullish on the Lightning Network, right? But I think the bears on, on the Lightning Network might be saying, "Oh, look, see, it's too hard for the sovereign individual. It's, you know, it's not private or, you know, and it's, it's sort of like, oh, you can't get the payments through or it's not reliable for larger amounts." And yeah, I, I think for me, maybe this is the Lightning Bull in me is saying, "Hey, look, it's only four years of main net. Like

And hardware wallets and every like, well, hardware wallets weren't a thing then, but the point being, it, it took a lot of technical capability to be able to use your own node with your own hardware wallet in, let's say, twenty seventeen, and I think it was only until, arguably, I mean, okay, yeah, there was Armory, so you could do the kind of Armory offline thing, which I did do when I was a, when I was a noob myself, but, you know, I think thinking back to Bitcoin, it's probably twenty nineteen or so Came out to sort of innovate that game of running your own Bitcoin core node with your own Electrum server and thus making it easy to run your own hardware wallet with that. And so, you know, it was twenty nineteen to do that. And so, I, I don't know, but I'm curious, what, what are your thoughts on that in terms of where Lightning is at relative to how long it's been out and relative to how easy it is for people to, you know, do their own things?

So we're in a weird spot right now because we're seeing so many things happen very

Terms either stating, intentions for future support of Lightning Network or, you know, a lot of exchanges and, on ramps supporting it this past year. that being said, I, I think everything is super, super nascent, as far as, you know, the protocol itself. We, we don't even have bolt twelve, fully out there. We don't have blinded routes and, and like decent privacy as, as standard for receivers yet. But I think really the things that are most nascent are Or the LSP stuff, we're really just scratching the surface, and, you'll see right now that the biggest attractors of, of lightning within our community are the people that are having to run the LSPs right now and have really taken a gamble trying to start up our early iterations of these services, really feeling the pain of capital allocation. You know, we've, we've got people who create awesome wallets in this space, who've told me privately that they don't wanna get into the LSP game because it's, you know, it's very difficult problem of, of capital allocation. Anyone will tell you who, anyone who's even just running a singular service on, on the web for, you know, an exchange or a store, like you can't predict the future flows really of where money is gonna be coming and going from, a hundred percent. so now add in thousands of users you're trying to, to offer your services to, and you're opening up channels to them on the hopes that you'll make a return on them, you know, routing a lot of transactions to them or them becoming a long-term customer. But they could just as easily delete your app and just have that channel open, it's like when you decide to close it. These channels, how much are you gonna open some on, initially? when do you re-up it, and for how much more? There's a lot of tricky challenges in the mix. This all being said, I think that there's gonna be a lot of interesting improvements to the network that happen in the next couple years that are gonna make, you know, operating these LSPs much easier and give these operators much more flexibility. But I also think that there's tons of experimentation that LSP operators have not even scratched the surface of, that I'm excited to see people get into, and, I think on that front, users have so much to benefit from.

Yeah, for sure. And that, that could benefit all kinds of users, whether they are using the more hybrid model sort of wallet or using their own full node and using LSP services to help manage the channels in and out or swapping in and out.

Yeah, I mean, for the default users, right? Like, it's, it's very difficult, Stefan, to imagine a world in which, like, my mom is gonna be managing her own channels, right? Like, she's just not really pragmatic, right? Today, best solution for her is probably using an LND hub I set up for her or, you know, doing trade-off and, and having a little less privacy and, and using one of these other apps. But, yeah, I mean, we all sort of came out the gate thinking that Autopilot would be a little bit more of an established thing, and that hasn't gotten too much innovation, but I'm really excited to see what's gonna happen moving forward and, and what roles LSPs can play, further in, onboarding these users, but also affording them flexibility, like, for example, like I'm not too keen wallets that have this LSP built into them, but don't give you any, any ability to, you know, take things into your own hands and open channels up on your own, right? Like, you got your node, it It's all running on your phone and, you know, you got a pretty good user experience, but what's the next step after that? Like, you're sort of just locked into their platform, you can't eject your node, you can't open up your own channels, you can't get into fee setting. It feels like some players are sort of just trying to recreate these walled gardens that I was talking about earlier.

I see, yeah. and in terms of privacy on the Lightning Network, I think this is another area where there are endless debates about the privacy on the Lightning Network, and of course, there are people working on ideas to improve that, people like Bastian from Asynk and others out there who are talking about this or have done talks and have spoken about how- A pathway to making Lightning more private with things like route blinding, traplane routing, and other ideas. I'm curious where you see things are so far. Do you see Lightning as an improvement, privacy improvement to just standard on-chain Bitcoin?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So I think we have this one improvement right out the gate in that the transactions don't get recorded to the blockchain ledger directly. yes, of course, you have to interact with the blockchain when you're opening or closing a channels, but just the very fact that the transactions themselves are, are ephemeral is a huge privacy improvement. That being said, you can't really say that using Lightning Network right now is, is private. There's a whole lot of caveats, starting from, you know, having to- To open up those channels on chain and the analysis there, perhaps, you know, Taproot channels will help out a little bit with that as, you know, all, Taproot transactions, you know, won't really able to, be able to distinguish what they're for, whether they're a channel open or not. Then you have the problem of the gossip network, where you're saying, "Oh, I got this open channel now, and, here's the UTXO to back it." That's a huge problem. This all being said, you know, On Lightning, the onion routing makes it so that receiver doesn't know exactly where it came from, just the last hop before it got to them. But receiver privacy isn't good. So when you create an invoice, it has your public key, which is tied to your, your, public gossip activity, embedded in the invoice. So, the real solution there is likely going to be blinded route, becoming standard in bull twelve and, just gonna be a little bit more calculation for the last person in your public op to figure out where exactly the transaction is going. So yeah, there's definitely a lot of caveats, and, and really if you wanna be using lightning even as a sender privately today, it really has to be done in conjunction with some other on-chain privacy tools, something like, you know, like a

coin join to fund the lightning node. Before end using Tor before you then, you know, make the payment. Yeah, absolutely,

and, and that's actually been a bit of a focus of mine with Zeus, we are trying to make it so that at least LND users are able to import xPubs and craft transactions for both their on-chain transactions and channel opens from external accounts, like, you know, x-Pubs. So we're hoping to get that functionality into version 0.7, which is our next major release, we're about like sixty percent through the integration there, but, We're trying to make sure it plays nicely with all the, you know, air gap, camera, and NFC hardware wallets. So that's been a bit of a challenge.

So typically, you're, you're having like an xPub function where you can kind of use coins from another wallet inside Zeus. Like, how would you get the signature over or how does that part work?

so the great thing is with a lot of these new hardware wallets is that they have ways of communicating over their air gap, so traditionally we've seen a lot of Devices like Seed Signer, The Foundation Passport, Kobo Vault, they use QR codes and cameras, and you can pass over the unsigned PSBT or partially signed Bitcoin transaction file over, animated QR codes. but now we also got stuff like the Cold Card Mark IV, which I thought I had on my desk. NFC. Yeah, it's got NFC now, and Zeus supports NFC. We just gotta make sure that data's uniform and we can talk back and forth, pretty easily.

Clap on. So then as an example, you could- Sort of open channels from your hardware wallet-ish, and then when they close back down, are they gonna close back down-- back to that theme, or are they gonna close back down into, say, your on-chain Bitcoin wallet inside Zeus, as an example?

So you could actually choose where you wanted to go at two points. You could say, "Okay, I'm channel open, I'm specifying my close out address," or when you're actually closing it out, you can change it again. So you're gonna have a lot of functionality, and within Zeus, you're gonna be able to even pop through your different hardware wallets and generate a fresh address just for certain operations like that. So yeah, that's, it's super exciting to just have some assurances about interacting with what potentially could be people's saving stacks on a hardware device and be able to use that In fairly safe manner to interact with the Lightning Network, so super excited about that. But I'm more so excited about the possibility of having, perhaps some of these, CoinJoin software providers to do a little work to help things work seamlessly in conjunction with us. So for example, Samurai Wallet's been working for a couple of years, it feels like, PSBT signing that get crafted from an external app, and, I would really love for them to, to get That over the finish line. That way, you could turn your Whirlpool mixes, into channel opens right within Zeus and not have to spend an extra transaction's worth of fees to move it over to Zeus's hot wallet. So I think there'd be a whole lot of benefits there. And, yeah, w-would love to provide that same functionality for, you know, all the different coin join providers, I'm sure we'll do it with Join Market if possible, and, you know, Wasabi too.

Yeah, gotcha. And you can imagine Imagine how that could be done either with a QR code or with NFC or, or maybe even if it's on the same device, right? Like if you had literally Samurai Wallet on the same phone with your Zeus, I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, definitely, especially, since we have, you know, sort of things like application linking where we could say, "No, just spit it out to Zeus," and it could just be a seamless thing between the two applications. Very much love to see that, you know, that's not really in my hands, but if anyone from Samurai Wallet would like to talk to me about it, I'm all ears.

Yeah, so I mean, I, I think that's pretty cool to see, and we might end up seeing a bit of that idea of a combo of CoinJoin and Lightning, and maybe that's- one way to take it forward. Also, I know, Lisa has done with Core Lightning this whole idea of collaborative channel opens, and so you could sort of say, let's say you and I do a, a collaborative channel open, and we both put some funds in, that kind of looks like a P2P, right?

Yeah, you don't really know who's putting up which funds exactly, and you get a whole lot of privacy in terms of, you know, the on-chain analysis there. So that's super exciting, and, you know, those dual-funded channel

where these offers are, are put in, being broadcast over Lightning's gossip network it, itself, super exciting, and, would be something that I would really, very much like to get into Zeus. I think it's really just contingent that CLN RPC API. So hopefully once we get that in, well, it's also gonna take some UI, UX work from our guy Bosh, but, yeah, definitely something I'm super excited about, and I think something that could really thrive, it just needs better interfaces. I think there's only one good- We for it in terms of, the Alan Router app. I don't think anyone else really has one for LOKU today, so it would be great to make Zeus the second, that being said, we got a lot on our plate, so don't wanna get anyone's hopes up that is coming too soon.

Yeah, of course. And I think it's like, there's so much work and so much, so many things that have to be done, but it seems to me like if you're really paying attention, you're seeing all this advancement and all this improvement over time,

It was way less reliable to do these things. Now we're sort of, we're seeing pretty steady improvement, at least, at least that's how, that's how it looks like to me. So, yeah. So, yeah, I guess any, finishing thoughts or things you wanna leave listeners with in terms of stuff they should be thinking about on Zeus or the Lightning Network just generally?

Yeah, absolutely. So a lot, it may seem intimidating, especially if you just, you know, use like a install and go Lightning wallet, but there's tons of great resources online and- Including our community, including, you know, countless guides. You know, if you need help getting set up with your own lightning node and connecting to Zeus, you can even hit me up directly. My DMs are open on Twitter and I'm on Telegram in our group, chatting all the time. Ultimately, I wanna try to prevent a world in which we're trusting custodians or third parties with our data to be using this great monetary network, and, I just want Zeus to be an option for people to, you know, do things themselves. you know, we'll write the The code for you to run on your device, and from there, I, I don't wanna know anything about your transaction data or, or your node at all. So, yeah, it's easy and, and you can do it with just a couple clicks. So, I encourage everyone out there who hasn't done already, just run your own node.

Excellent. And yeah, so listeners, as I said, I, I'm a Zeus user myself, I encourage you check it out. And, Evan, where can people find you and where can they find Zeus online?

Yeah, sure thing.

O u d i s, Zeus is on there at Zeus L N, L N for Lightning Network, so Zeus L N, and our main website is at, Zeus L N dot app. Our code's all free and open source, and, if you're a coder, reach out, we'll help you get set up, and, you know, the more contributors, the merrier.

Have fun. Thanks.

Cheers to fun.

Get the show notes at stephanelivera dot com slash three seven six. Thanks for listening, and I will see you in the citadels.