Bolt.fun - Legends of Lightning

Hi, you're listening to Stephan Livera podcast, a show about Bitcoin and Austrian economics, brought to you by Swan Bitcoin. Today my guests are John Beharry and Ed from the Bolt.fun website and project, which is about a, essentially a meta hackathon on Bitcoin and Lightning. So they're running a tournament, it's called the Legends of Lightning, and we talk about that in this episode. Episode. Now a message from some of the show sponsors. Are you using a plain old block explorer? Bitcoin has grown beyond a single layer, it's now a fully fledged multi-layer ecosystem, and mempool dot space is a comprehensive Bitcoin explorer that covers this ecosystem for you, whether it's the mempool, the blockchain, or second layer networks like Lightning Network. You can use mempool dot space to target your fee rate when you're about to send a Bitcoin transaction, and the cool thing is, with mempool dot space, you can run it yourself, you can host it on your own. Full node using distros like Umbrel, Raspiblitz or manually installing it or others. For enterprises, Mempool.Space offers customized mempool instances with your company's branding, increased API limits and more. Learn more over at mempool.space/enterprise. When it comes to Bitcoin hardware, security and other accessories, CoinKite.com is the place to go. They are known for a range of products, most notably the Coldcard. The MK4 is the latest version. It has NFC support. It's got Got two secure elements, it has more RAM and faster CPU to give you faster signing of transactions. It's a very reliable performer and you can set it up without plugging it in to your computer. You can use a micro SD card to move things back and forth, or perhaps for your less secure setups, you might use the NFC support. Coincard also have TapSigner and SatsCard, these are more affordable devices that are coming in at a lower price point and they have NFC support, so you can really experience what might be the next level of Bitcoin user experience. You can get all of these products and more over at coinkite dot com and use code livera for a discount on your cold cards. Now, the lead sponsor of Stephan Livera podcast is Swan Bitcoin. With Swan, you can learn about Bitcoin and you can buy it. Swan makes all kinds of resources available free for anyone, even if you're not a customer, you can get free copies of books such as Twenty One Lessons by Gigi or Inventing Bitcoin by Jan Pritzkir. Go to swan dot com slash free book. And Swan is putting on a conference, it Pacific Bitcoin, it's on 10th and 11th of November this year in LA, California. I'm gonna be one of the hosts. There's an awesome lineup of speakers and people coming along, people like Michael Saylor, Lynn Alden, Pierre Richard, Morgan Richard, Alex Epstein, Preston Pish, and so many more. I'm looking forward to seeing you there. If you're interested, make sure you check it out. The tickets are available over at pacificbitcoin.com and use the code lavera for a discount. And now onto the show with Johns and Ed. Johns

Hey, thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having us. Great to be here.

Great. So I know you guys are working on this, lightning kind of like a hackathon, but also a competition. Let's hear a little bit about this. I guess it's a tournament is probably the easiest way to explain it. So, do you wanna firstly tell us, each a little bit about yourselves? We'll start with you, Johns.

Alright, so I'm Johns. I'm from a tiny island in the Caribbean, and,

So there was a need for payments, solutions for payments, that I, that I was, encountering, some challenges with it in the Caribbean. It's easy to, you know, for some folks to get money in and stuff, but it's difficult for, local businesses and stuff to operate, especially digitally. So, yeah, a few years ago, I got involved in the Bitcoin design community when it was forming, and, yeah, helped, create some stuff on the Bitcoin design Guide got the grant from Square. a lot of my research has been in payments and privacy, and, decided that, wanted to see more innovation happening on the application layer, like that were not just wallets. And, yeah, that's kind of, the thing that bred Bolt.fun out of that, to trying to put, push innovation on the application layer.

Yeah. And Ed, let's hear a little bit from you. Can you give us just a bit of a, just a basic background on yourself and what, how you got involved in all this?

Sure, yeah, hey everybody, my name is, Ed, from the UK. I've sort of been in the product space for about five and a half years now, kind of ever since. Looking for like a more remote work. I got into Bitcoin kind of in sort of late twenty sixteen, met Johns a couple of years after, and since then we've sort of been working on building out, different Bitcoin products, improving UX, privacy. As Johns mentioned, we've done a lot of sort of research, through sort of Square grants and On, coin control, coin selection, which we did for the Bitcoin Design Guide as well. and then about January this year, we sort of birthed the Bolt Fund project, which, as you mentioned, is really just trying to sort of bring a bit of innovation to the Lightning layer, and as well to the sort of base protocol and kind of encouraging a more friendly community environment for developers to get involved in sort of Bitcoin applications and tools.

Great. So can you just give us a background then? Bolt dot fun, what's the high level aim, what's the high level, you know, overview, what's going on here with Bolt dot fun?

I think on the highest level, fun is mandatory in this project. The cool part is about lightning, so it's effectively to, you know, make Bitcoin development feel a little bit more accessible to people, right? a lot of people have this idea that Bitcoin's kind of like inflexible, slow, you know You know, these, these narratives that have, been going through, and, you know, we're trying to like reframe that in a way and say, hey, you know, there's really cool things that you can build and do on the lightning, on Bitcoin, whether it's the base layer or, especially lightning network. And here's how to do it. Here's a friendly environment in which you can learn and meet other people, in this maker community that we're kind of trying to set up. And yeah, we're learning as well

Public with those mistakes as well, so then other people can learn from it, because this kind of stuff hasn't been really done before in Bitcoin.

Right. and so what we have seen in the Bitcoin space historically is, let's say, hackathons, that might be a weekend project. Why, why the different approach this time? what's the thinking there?

so earlier in the year, we ran a couple of, I guess, as you kind of said, more traditional style hackathons, maybe they're a long weekend or at most maybe like a week. these were the Shock the Web events. So, when we started with Bolt.fun, we had a sort of a heavy web focus because we kinda needed to focus our own work, a lot of the UX that we were trying to implement with WebLN or LNURL. So, we tried to get people hacking on Web, and they were really interesting. These were the first time we had run events, first time we had run hackathons online, rather than in person, and it was the, the metrics were kind of interesting. I think we, we had about sort of three thousand thousand dollars in prizes, which got a little bit of attention, got a few people in, most people hadn't really hacked on Lightning before, so everyone was kind of new. We put on a bunch of workshops, and it was a pretty fiery, intense few days where people got a, a pretty good introduction to Lightning and, and how to start building. but we kind of noticed this issue, which I'm sure a lot of workshop or sort of hackathon organizers vote, face, which is kind of this maker drop-off rate where you have this really intense weekend, people come, they build cool applications, but then the hackathon ends and no one really does anything with a lot of these projects, and it kind of then stifles innovation. You get a bunch of half-built-out projects in the space, development isn't continued, there's not enough support or resources for the founders of those projects to kind of continue, as well as funding. So with this, tournament approach, that is kind of the, the issue that we tried to, to solve there was How can we get people building more regularly? How can we get them building in public? And how can we try and sort of foster a little bit more of a, a community where people can come and they can actually kind of accelerate or incubate their projects, rather than just hack on something 'cause it's interesting for a weekend and never touch it again. We kind of want people to build longer lasting teams, find more support, development support from the community, even the design community as well. The Bitcoin design community's been great and- And helping provide us support with that, and, and generally just have a wider sort of access to resources. So, the Legends of Lightning tournament, which is the, the competition which we're holding at the moment, it runs for nine weeks, so it's way bigger time period, it allows people to kind of hack on their nights and weekends, which is good for the people who aren't doing this nine to five, which a lot of people in the space, you'd be surprised how many people aren't doing this full time, so we just wanted to kind of like Open the, open the gates a little bit wider for, for more people to take part, for more people to learn, and also really for a lot of the workshops that we're gonna host as well, and the sort of the series on those, for that information to kind of sink in, for people to kind of learn from it, get mentored through, try it out, fail, run into some blockers, and then come back and, and get a bit more help. So it's just a little bit more of a full cycle with, with the tournaments.

Yeah, it's an interesting point Time period, the nine weeks, as he said. So currently it's, twelfth of October through to the seventh of December is the current, this is the Legends of Lightning tournament. I know historically hackathons have almost been more like a fun thing or maybe a bit of a community fun thing, and in some cases there has been a project that resulted from it or maybe the connections that people made, they later on went on to start a, found up and do a startup together or make some project that maybe was born from a hackathon. But I, I presume that- And the idea here with Legends of Lightning is that it might be a more fully fleshed out product or service or software project that emerges is, is that, I guess, that's the idea that we're going for here.

Yeah, definitely. And, someone also mentioned to me, like made this point, you know, sometimes at these hackathons, the people who are the most prepared are the one, and the ones who end up winning are the ones who, work in the space and they, you know, already have their boilerplate And, you know, development kits, you know, ready for the hackathon, you know, they're ready in the know, they know how to solve certain problems already, you know, so to Ed's point there, you know, by giving, like, by stretching it out, this long and having this kind of, kind of format, we're allowing new people to enter the space, which actually is something that is very, very important, for us to do, because I'm not gonna go into that article, that I was, thinking about, but People coming into the space, there needs to be new developers, new designers, new blood, and we can't just be like complacent and just say, like, "Well, you know what? Eventually they'll make it back to Bitcoin," you know? Because, you know, like a lot of people right now, they're like interested in all this hype blockchain technology and all that, right? So, you know, if we just let them go off somewhere else, that's gonna be like a few years of them learning some skills on some shitcoin project or whatever that they They don't really care, right? They just wanna work in blockchain. So, there's a lot of small problems and stuff like that, UX problems, design patterns, wallet development, use cases that have to be, kind of worked on, and we need people for that. You know, a lot of companies are having, are struggling finding people with the required skills to work in the Bitcoin space, right? So, yeah, I think it's very important to be able to open up for new people to come into the space,

you know? And On the website, there are various prizes here. So we've got a one Bitcoin prize for the overall best, and there are, is a two, half Bitcoin prizes for runner, runner-ups or runners-up, and there's also some different tracks. So could you just explain a little bit about the prizes and the tracks and, who's gonna get what?

Yeah, for sure. So essentially to kind of enter the tournament, we're asking projects to select a track, to begin with. So similar to a lot of other events in Hack- Keyterms: ANYPREVOUT, Beharry, Bitcoin, Blockstream, Bolt.fun, Bolt.fun - Legends of Lightning, Ed, Johns, Johns Beharry, Lightning, Sparrow Wallet, Stephan Livera, Stratum, Taproot, eltoo, multisig, splicing, xPub. Hackathons, tracks are kind of there to help people sort of focus their projects a little bit and narrow down the scope of what sort of problems, whether it is a sort of a global or a local solution or even just sort of a, a UX hurdle. so the, the tracks Kind of a wide net there. And then we also have the Building for Africa track. So this is, partnered up with the African Bitcoin Conference, who were, they were gonna host a hackathon for their event, and we just thought, why don't we just combine these things? There's no point running two sort of simultaneous hackathons and spreading attention out. Let's just get it in as a track. So both of the tracks have about ten thousand dollars in prizes, or it is, I think, exactly ten thousand dollars in prizes. So it's five K to the first place,

A half to third, and then there's also a best design prize, 'cause this is something that we're trying to sort of actively encourage in these tournaments, is really awesome sort of UI/UX work, just in general to try and sort of increase, use, and adoption of, of these technologies, we believe that's pretty central to it. and then separate to the tracks is, as you mentioned, these kind of grand prizes, these sort of bigger awards, which, any project that enters into the tournament through a track Track will automatically be registered for this, and this is, like you said, so it's gonna be one Bitcoin to the, the overall winner, which is, we're calling sort of the legend, and then we're gonna have two runners-up, which is, point five BTC each. So a, one project itself could win up to three prizes. They could get the legend award, which is one Bitcoin, they could also get first place and best design in their track, which is another six grand in prizes. So, you know, one project could take home over twenty-five thousand dollars worth Which is obviously pretty huge and hopefully would then kind of accelerate potentially their next year of funding or half year of funding, whatever it is, just to make sure it keeps going.

I see, so part of this is also to ensure that the business or startup has at least some funding, and, presumably then there are ways that if that project looks successful, they may be able to appeal out for more funding from other, let's say, venture capitalists in the space or investors or angel investors. Investors in the space, so I suppose it's, it's like a, a starting track that gives them an opportunity.

Yeah, exactly. Like I think, to be honest, one, one of the ways that we wanted to really position this tournament was more of an accelerator style event. So we're getting projects in, we're getting them to sort of improve their process, to build in public, but also, like you said, to give them sort of connections to a lot of these different funding routes. So throughout the tournament, we're gonna be hosting a bunch of workshops for makers Build on Lightning, how to issue assets on Taro or stable sat on Goloy or, whatever it might be, but fundamentally another important workshop which people and founders need to go through is how can I get funding for my project and how can I actually continue this? So towards the end, we're gonna have a couple of workshops on, grant funding. So this is gonna be given by, the folks at Geyser and Opensats, who you may be familiar with, and then also we're gonna do some workshops with some of the VCs, so Fol Ventures who are gonna be sponsoring, most of these prizes, they're gonna be, we're gonna be doing some sort of office hours with them, with Mike from Lightning Ventures, Max from Hive Mind. So immediately it's gonna be great for these founders of these projects because they have such a close connection to not only the people who are sponsoring these prizes, but the people who are giving workshops and direct advice on how to take your next steps and basically how to create a sustainable project moving forward.

So when it comes to judging the projects, can you- You outlined a little bit the criteria here. What, what are the criteria that projects will be judged on?

Yeah, so there are gonna be seven criteria for the, for the projects. Just to explain a little bit the, the timeline, people are gonna hack until sort of November 24th, and then we're gonna take a small pause, and the judges are gonna evaluate all the projects, and then we'll announce a shortlist of finalists for each track on the 28th of November. They'll then have another week, and then they'll pitch their projects live on kind of like They're actually gonna be evaluated on is gonna be sort of Bitcoin integration and scalability. There's gonna be execution of the idea, product market fits, design, so sort of UI/UX. there's gonna be sort of extra awards for a bit of spice factor, so do you know, do they take the project above and beyond? And then the most important one, I would argue, is probably the build in public criteria, which we'll talk about a bit, but we really wanna push people to kind of build in public and learn in public, as John's gonna- I mentioned there is really little sort of resources and documentation on how to actually build, these types of projects. You know, immediately if you go into the, the Ethereum space or the Solana space, you have a whole wide range of documents, of developer resources, design resources on, you know, how to build a smart contract that does X or how to build your first NFT platform or whatever it is, and people might not necessarily be interested in building projects exactly like that, but there needs to- Be a lot of innovation and drive on Bitcoin, and for that to happen, we think that people do need to build in public. So this is gonna be providing sort of weekly progress reports, or this sort of PPP's structure that, that we tend to implement ourselves, this plans, progress, and progress, and then also sort of posting about milestones as they go throughout the event. So, you know, big updates, feature releases, maybe partnerships that they're trying to integrate and, and things like that.

Yeah, and then we get to use some of these- reports and stuff to, figure out, these are like weekly check-ins that, each project has to do. it helps us like, in the judging criteria as well to figure out like, what was done within the time of the hackathon, but it also helps us, figure out, how we can help those projects. So I was reading some of the, reports yesterday, a few of them said they were, you know, missing documentation for L and U and O, they couldn't really understand We'll do since we see that we'll, you know, put on a workshop for that to help those projects, right? And be able to direct them and stuff, you know.

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As of right now, I think this, this weekend we crossed two hundred, makers, registering. the amount of projects, I think there's, there's north of twenty so far. But one of the, one of the things that we're going to have to figure out is, you know, how do we help these projects, stay motivated? It's a long period of time, right? It's not a weekend People might feel like, at some point midway or after a few weeks that, you know, they can't do it or they're gonna go back to normal life and, you know, leave their project on the side. So we're gonna, hopefully try to do various things like highlight your project and feature you on, some of the Meet the Makers, podcast kind of thing that we do as well, and just try to connect people as well to various resources to keep them motivated. Yeah. So Ed, what would you say?

With regards to some of the projects that we've seen, maybe it's a good one to talk about, we had a call last night in our community Discord, we've got some people who are building, onboarding payment applications where if your friend doesn't claim the SATs that you send them, then they automatically get returned to you. There was one on sort of value for value recipes, that people wanna, wanna do, kind of like an OnlyFans but for chefs, which is cool. There are, there's one from Dangled at, Chaincase, I think they're So I'm no looking, which is about opening up lightning channels in one sort of on-chain transaction using things like payjoins, got, ticketing and raffle sort of platforms, there are quite a few actually, you can, you can find them all by scrolling through the, some of the posts on, on Bolt.fun, a lot of people are sort of posting about their ideas in there, but, I think there's also been a suggestion from Galloy, they're trying to team up with some of the people at Collider to, in- To integrate sort of stable sat's into their platform, but a lot of these projects as well, hopefully, are gonna come out of the Bitcoin Designathon, which is the, the Bitcoin Design Community event, which is kind of happening at the moment, and there are gonna be some, some projects on Taro, so we've got some workshops this week on Taro and sort of how to get started, how to build with it, so hopefully we might see some interesting and innovative applications, sort of more typically associated with Web three, with sort of digital assets and, and tokens and To start, people are kind of formulating, still forming teams, but yeah, it's gonna be really cool. I'd like to see a project built out as well on the, the UTXO wallet which I suggested. But, it's gonna, it's gonna be cool. It's a different mix of sort of on-chain and lightning, which is another thing to, to say there is that, yes, the, the tournament is called Legends of Lightning, but if people build really awesome on-chain applications and tools as well, then that's most welcome.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to Priced out, we'll see. I mean, depends on, you know, adoption and how soon and how quickly that goes that, maybe the non-monetary uses just get priced out, but, remains open to see, and certainly it's interesting to see the community adoption and the applications out there that are using things like LNURL. And I notice even on the website you've got LNURL auth as an example. So for listeners who aren't familiar, this idea is you can log into things using your lightning node, and basically it's based on the public key With your lightning node. And so, I know as an example, even, Sparrow Wallet, as an example, has this idea of Auth47, which is all, kind of a similar idea, but based off Pip47, but still using the public key and still logging into things off of that. So, it'll be interesting to see if that's getting more adoption and whether there are projects who are, let's say, leveraging that, and this becomes like a, a standard that we use in Bitcoin and Lightning.

Yeah, it's, you know, we just Was it, a BIP 47 has been around for such a long time, recently there's a kind of resurgence about, about using it. There's, there's good and bad and different arguments on whichever side, but at the end of the day, let's just like use stuff, experiment with it on the application layer at least, and see what could come out of it. Maybe some other BIP or some better, thing comes out after. But, you know, these primitives, we need to start playing around with them a little bit Patterns and stuff. Or, I don't wanna mention one thing about, the projects though. It also doesn't have to be a new project. You know, if you have an existing project, you can jump in with that as well. And what we're looking for is, of course, building in public becomes a lot more important there, but we're basically looking at how you significantly update your application or your project, within that time. And it doesn't have to be a business either, it can be an open source tool. So just wanna also clarify that part.

I see, because as an example, there are, I can think of cases where there are tools that aren't necessarily part of a business, but they're just something that other developers or builders in the space might use, or a tool that individuals in the space might use. So it might, if it, potentially if it's something that helps with other developers who are developing for Bitcoin or Lightning, then maybe that's an example there, although, maybe that's maybe a little harder to assess in terms of what's the value of this thing. but I guess that's also why the judges are there. And so I see on the website there's a range of different judges. So could you just talk through, for people who don't know, who are some of the judges, who's going to be judging, the projects?

Yeah, we got some heavy hitters actually. So, of course, the boy Roy, from Breeze, we got John Carvalho, Oleg, who, actually came to us with the idea about, you know, how-- I think initially That are happening, this fall, you know, and is it possible to kind of create this like meta hackathon essentially? Because, he's been supporting us, you know, since the beginning of Shakti where we re-um, really, like the project. So, yeah, so Oleg's there, we got, Obi from Fedi, Max Webster, a bunch of VC, a bunch of VC judges, and those guys are kind of important because, again, you know, they're also kind of like on the lookout for new

So kind of like aligned up. We got, Victor and Mary. We, I got Paco from, Run With Bitcoin. There's a panel of like, judges specifically for the building for Africa track because it makes sense to have, people who aren't familiar with those kind of use cases to be judging those things. So, there's a whole panel there of judges for the building for Africa. Mike from, Lightning Ventures. Cleb Lab has been repping like really awesome. We got like these- I think not last weekend, the weekend before, there was, a Desigual Pled weekend, and, they just before the Legends of Lightning kicked off, they were doing like a bunch of talks and workshops and stuff, and, like, helping projects get started. And then throughout the Legends of Lightning tournament as well, they're also going to be like offering mentorship and stuff. So, there's a few locations around the world that you can actually go and like meet other people who are hacking, within Legends Of lightning or get mentorship. There's Bitcoin Miami, there's a Pleb TLV as well in, Israel. yeah, so it's, it's gotten quite big, there's a lot of judges there, but that's also good for, the individual projects also because a bunch of people who are kind of like top of the industry are getting to look at your project and giving you feedback and stuff. So I think that's, super valuable just by itself.

And I noticed also there is a guide on, Bolt.fun. So it looks like To an overview of lightning and various concepts in lightning are being explained here. so what's the intent there?

Well, I think that was, part of like the genesis, right? the idea of the guide was, basically, a dump of like some research from the formation of the Bitcoin design guide. We were just like dropping notes in, in there. those notes were a bit, a bit more technical than what we were targeting for the designers, and then That's how we kind of realized it's like, well, you know, if you have designers in one corner, developers in another corner, separate communities, maybe there's a way that we could like bring them together because there's a lot of complexities about the technologies that, designers kind of like try to shy away from, and, you know, if you're, if you're working in a startup or a project or whatever, you, you kinda have to face them head on because you're working on a singular team with these folks, right? Instead of like separate silos. The Genesis and, what we're-- the intention of it, I guess, was to, be that like a little bit more technical documentation than the Bitcoin Design Guide, but enough for like a application developer or someone who just wants to go a little bit more technical than just like the, the UI components, you know?

Yeah. Okay. And while we're here, actually, could you just tell us a little bit about the Bitcoin Design Community for people maybe they're new, they don't really know what that is, how-- what's that and how's that? Yeah,

so the Bitcoin design community is a, basically a, a group of folks who are interested in helping Bitcoin, reach mass adoption. And how does it do that? It, we're gonna need to have better user experience. The technology is quite, complex. we need to dumb it down a little bit for, you know, For folks to be able to, use, to use in a safe way. And there are a lot of footguns and things that, applications out there that can, you know, make people lose a lot of their money or, yeah. So the Bitcoin design community, we try to basically, onboard new designers as well. So we create like, this thing called a Bitcoin design guide. It's a collection of design patterns and, design resources. Like Figma, components and quality I kit, et cetera, that just allows designers to join the field and be able to contribute to those, UI and UX problems. There's about three thousand five hundred people now, I think. So, yeah, it's, it's growing. And, you know, if you wanna do like user research Just design explorations, some artistic stuff is kind of the place for you. Developers already have their place on GitHub, you know, but we need kind of like more creative, design-oriented people, coming in as well to give that other perspective.

Great. So, bringing it back to Legends of Lightning and Bolt.fun, is the aim then that this carries on even after, like, let's say, even after the end of this particular tournament, is the aim that this will carry on as an ongoing community or something? Some kind of ongoing meta hackathon?

hopefully so. it's a lot of work. Ed is, you know, handling a lot of the operations, the majority of operations on it. Yeah, we're hoping, we're hoping so. The hope is that we can do like one every quarter. That's a lot to bite off, though. we don't necessarily have a business model or anything like that. We're just trying to engage the community and, yeah, help foster this kind of innovation and onboard new people. So yeah, I- Ideally, we're able to do it one every quarter, lasting for two months for next year, so it's a regular thing that people know that they can be a part of. And, yeah, again, it's about sustainability, right? Helping the projects, continue to exist after the event.

So, are there any, I guess even at this early stage, are there any projects that you would like to see or any areas you would particularly like to see building go on, building down, any particular pathways?

Oh, that I mean, I think it would be nice to see a myriad of different projects get worked on. We are huge proponents of on-chain privacy as well, so it'd be cool to see some more standardizations of applications on the sort of the base layer, whether it's coin joins, pay joins, better labeling or sort of contact management that type of thing. We had a really cool project in the, the previous hackathon which, which kind of did that as well. And then I guess when it comes to lightning, obviously- See, your first thought might be sort of payments, but I think we're kind of interested to see how Lightning can be used more as an application layer or as an infrastructure for sort of web applications or sort of mobile native applications as well, but how you could use sort of one sat microtransactions even just for an interaction, a sort of a, a website interaction or a UX interaction. I guess also with the recent updates of sort of Taro, RGB, stable sat, I think we're gonna probably see More use cases of things like community banking, maybe sort of getting more assets onto Bitcoin. I think the, whilst I think I probably speak for both Johns and I, we're very much sort of Bitcoin maximalists, we do like to see experimentation and innovation, and I think that we need to do a better job at attracting a larger pool of developer talent, at least on that application layer, and get people sort of playing around with some of these tools. So there is probably gonna be some projects which- People might not necessarily like whether it's NFTs or shitcoins and assets or whatever it might be, but I think that that's kind of a necessary sort of hurdle for us to get through in order to kind of develop more meaningful projects and things which just go beyond kind of just like a simple sort of payment platform or wallet application. You mentioned the use case of LNEO L Orth. I've talked a lot about sort of passwordless authentication and this as a sort of a standard UX practice coming into Web 2 as well as Web 3 application. I would like to see more of this done as well. I think there's an awesome project by a developer called Dolo. It's called ZeroLogin. I think he's gonna be entering into the, the tournament with that. and it's essentially kind of abstracting passwordless authentication, but obviously using sort of Bitcoin as the backend and doing it in a way where actually users don't even know that they're necessarily interacting with Bitcoin or Lightning. And I think that that's probably where we'll see a lot of unconscious adoption, is probably the way I would phrase it, where we It's more kind of like the rails of, a more sort of sturdy rails of Web three or the next generation of kind of applications that we see being built.

I think it's gonna be quite interesting when, you know, Taproot gets like properly released and stuff like that, what the perception folks are gonna have for the things that are gonna, gonna be getting built on it. There's a big narrative within the community now shifting towards like stablecoins being, you know, necessary and stuff, but, you know, people are gonna be, minting their own, shitcoins is gonna happen on Bitcoin, so that's gonna be an interesting thing to see, that culture and stuff come to Bitcoin now. Hopefully we could still enforce the principles and philosophies that, we've developed and kept, kept strong with, over the years, but, yeah, it's gonna be some interesting times ahead.

Right. I think there's a lot, there's a lot of, things that will be controversial for some people, like so, you know, it depends on the view. I've heard My friend n v k over at CoinKite, he sometimes says, "Hey, bring all the shit coins on top of Bitcoin related things. Other people will be more anti them and say, 'No, no stable coins,' or, you know, don't, don't promote, don't spend time and effort promoting those." I could also see some people disagreeing even about the terminology, right? So Web three, is the, is the branding, is the name tarnished, like, because we saw, for example, Block and I think TBD come out with But nevertheless, it'll be interesting, to see what happens, with Tara, although, and that's the other one, I know some pe-some people in the community even, I've seen people critique that idea of saying, "Is it even on Lightning per se?" But, nevertheless, if it's a technology that people are interacting with on their Lightning node, it'll be an interesting question to see what kind of wallets, what kind of applications come out that are using Lightning, Lightning standards, things like, LNURL at the application level, to a service and, I, I think the broader point that is an important one, I think it's to echo the one that our friend Ardie has made from Summer of Bitcoin, where he's saying, "Bitcoin needs more developers, we need ways to increase and improve the mindshare of Bitcoin and Lightning, and to get lots of developers in here, and whether they're developers, entrepreneurs, designers, people who can contribute in some way to get them familiar and start building things that might eventually be years down the line by lots of people. Without even knowing, as you said it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I guess my sort of, my take on it is that I am not a huge fan of a lot of the projects that are coming out on Ethereum and Solana for, for various reasons. I think some of them have interesting use cases and could provide utility, I'm not kind of, powering off every single one of them, but I think the reality of it is, is that unless those projects are being built on Bitcoin, we're just losing out on a whole load of- Transactional, but also developer and interest volume from in the space, and I think that that then kind of has this knock-on effect, which people don't go down the Bitcoin rabbit hole first, instead they go down a Solana rabbit hole, and then the way that that kind of then forms your perception of how you can use these technologies and what, practices you should implement, or even as John said, like the ethos that kind of comes in the Bitcoin space, I think is a really strong one, and I think it's, it's good that it's strong, and I think, you know, Looking at kind of BIPS versus EIPs the other day, and it's crazy the amount of EIPs that have come out, and there's obviously been a lot of fast innovation on Ethereum, but that doesn't necessarily translate to, that's good. I think the, there is an argument for having slower innovation on the base layer of Bitcoin, and I think this kind of like slow and steady approach has worked really well for Bitcoin. But I think when it comes to kind of lightning fast, innovation, I think that's probably gonna be done on, on the layer- Lightning network, and I'm kind of looking forward to seeing those things come. And when you look at the knock-on effect, right, of, for example, like Dogecoin's project, which kind of had this huge catastrophic failure earlier in the year, and I, I found myself thinking, "Oh, God, thank God that that project wasn't built on Bitcoin, because it would have had this really bad effect." But actually, the network effect for a lot of people in the space and outside of the space as well is that that bad reputation is still kind of attached somewhat to- To Bitcoin, so it doesn't really matter if it's kind of like a shitcoin existing parallel to Bitcoin, or if it's actually built on Bitcoin itself, it, it kind of has a very similar kind of ripple effect through the network. And I think it's probably better to welcome people in with open arms and to say, "Hey, we're gonna give you constructive criticism on your projects, "or "We're gonna tread with caution and implement that kind of slightly slower, more sturdy Bitcoin ethos, "which I think a lot of people want, but maybe also kind of give people And stick as well and, and try and see some things experimented with.

Yeah, I can imagine, there are still a lot of debates raging in the Bitcoin world about, let's say, the level of Bitcoin conservatism that we should have, and should it just be money, and should we be more focused on, let's say, privacy and security and verifiability in these aspects versus should there be more effort on applications and, features and things. and I can understand, there's definitely that tension in the community, but nevertheless, I think It's an interesting project, and I think there's, definitely, some value there in terms of pulling, you know, developers and talented people into the space, and they might be working on something that ends up improving the way we interact with Bitcoin and Lightning, and maybe they are improving in some way the privacy of the way people interact with, Bitcoin and Lightning. So, let's see. so listen, just make sure you check it out. The website is bolt.fun, and johns and ed. Where can people find you guys online?

You can find me Beharry, pretty much everywhere. j h n s b e h a r r y on Twitter on Bolt.fun, yeah, that's where I'm pretty much hanging out in the Bitcoin design community as well.

Yeah, same goes here. you can find me pretty much everywhere online, Twitter, Discord. my handle on Twitter is, zap z a p underscore ed, and I'm befa88 on Discord and GitHub as well.

Fantastic. Well, great to chat, guys, and, thanks for joining me.

Yeah

Show notes are available over at stephanolivera dot com slash four two five. As always, if you're enjoying the show, make sure to share it with your family and friends so they can learn about Bitcoin. That's it from me, I'll see you in the pseudodales.