SLP425 Johns Beharry & Ed – Bolt.fun –  Legends of Lightning

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Johns Beharry and Ed of the Bolt.fun project join me to chat about this new online bitcoin and lightning meta-hackathon and how you can get involved. 

  • How it got started
  • Prizes and Tracks
  • How teams will be judged
  • Guide
  • Makers
  • Growing the bitcoin developer + designer community

Links:  

Sponsors:

Stephan Livera links:

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera – 00:00:01:

Johns and Ed, welcome to the show.

Johns Beharry – 00:00:03:

Hey, thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here.

Ed – 00:00:06:

Thank you for having us. Great to be here.

Stephan Livera – 00:00:08:

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, it’s probably the easiest way to explain it. So do you want to firstly tell us each a little bit about yourself? We’ll start with you, John.

Johns Beharry – 00:00:25:

All right, so I’m John from a tiny island in the Caribbean and I got into bitcoin some years ago because there was a need for solutions for payments that I was encountering some challenges with it in the Caribbean. It’s easy 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 for me, and I helped create some stuff on the bitcoin design guide, got a grant from Square. A lot of my research has been on payments and privacy and decided that wanted to see more innovation happening on the application layer that were not just wallets and yeah, that’s kind of the thing that read both on trying to push innovation on the application layer.

Stephan Livera – 00:01:26:

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

Ed – 00:01:33:

Sure, yeah. Hi, 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, ever since, looking for a more remote work. I got into bitcoin kind of in sort of late 2016, 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 has mentioned, we’ve done a lot of research through sort of square grants and things 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 he mentioned, is really just trying to sort of bring a bit of innovation to the Lightning layer and as well to the sort of baseball score and kind of encouraging a more friendly community environment for developers to get involved in sort of bitcoin applications and tools. Great.

Stephan Livera – 00:02:31:

So can you just give us a background then? Bolt.fun? What’s the high level aim? What’s the high level overview? What’s going on here with bolt.fun?

Johns Beharry – 00:02:43:

I think on the highest level, fun is mandatory in this project. The bolt part is about Lightning, so it’s effectively to make bitcoin development feel a little bit more accessible to people. A lot of people have this idea that bitcoin is kind of like inflexible slow. These narratives that have been going through and we’re trying to reframe that in a way and say. Hey. There’s really cool things that you can build and do 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, so we’re going to be making mistakes also, right? But we want to be public with those mistakes as well so that other people can learn from it because this kind of stuff hasn’t been really done before in bitcoin.

Stephan Livera – 00:03:40:

Great. And so what we have seen in the bitcoin space historically is, let’s say hackathons that might be a weekend project. Why the different approaches this time? What’s the thinking there?

Ed – 00:03:54:

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 Boltfun, we had a sort of a heavy web focus because we kind of needed to focus our own work. A lot of the UX that we were trying to implement with WebLN  or LN-URL, so we try to get people hacking on web and they were really interesting. These were the first time we had run events, first time we’d run the hackathons online rather than in person. And the metrics were kind of interesting. I think we had about $3,000 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 pretty good introduction to Lightning and had to start building. But we kind of noticed this issue which I’m sure a lot of workshop or hackathon organizers face, which is kind of this make a 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 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 issue that we tried 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 community where people can come and they can actually kind of accelerate or incubate their projects rather than just hack on something because 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 has been great in helping provide us support with that and generally just have a wider set of access to resources. So the Legends of Lightning Tournament, which is the competition, which we’re holding at the moment, 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 9 to 5, which a lot of people in the space, you’d be surprised how many people are not doing this full time. So we just wanted to kind of open the gates a little bit wider for more people to take part. For more people to learn. And also really for a lot of the workshops that we’re going to 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 get a bit more help. So it’s just a little bit more of a full cycle with the tournaments. Yeah.

Stephan Livera – 00:07:00:

It’s an interesting point you make about stretching this out over a longer time period than nine weeks, as you said. So currently it’s twelve of October through to the 7th. December is the current this is the Legend 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 went on to start up and do a startup together or make some project that maybe was born from a hackathon. But I presume then 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. I guess that’s the idea that we’re going for here.

Johns Beharry – 00:07:47:

Yeah, definitely. And someone also mentioned to me, like, made this point. Sometimes at these hackathons, the people who are the most prepared are the ones and the ones who end up winning are the ones who work in the space. And they already have their boilerplates and development kits ready for the hackathon. They’re already in the node, they know how to solve certain problems already. So to Ed’s point there, by searching it out this long and having this 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 going to go into that article that I was thinking about. But yeah, we need to have new people coming into the space. There needs to be new developers, new designers, new blood, and we can’t just be complacent in this way, like, well, eventually they’ll make it back to bitcoin because a lot of people right now they’re interested in all this Hype blockchain technology and all that, right? So if we just let them go off somewhere else, that’s going to be like a few years of them learning some skills on some shit coin project or whatever that they could have been applying to bitcoin. Because for them, they don’t really care, they just want to 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. A lot of companies are struggling finding people with the required skills to work in the bitcoin space. So yeah, I think it’s very important to be able to open up for new people to come into the space.

Stephan Livera – 00:09:31:

And also, I noticed just from looking at the website, there are various prizes here. So we’ve got a one bitcoin prize for the overall best and there are two half bitcoin prizes for 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 going to get what?

Ed – 00:09:52:

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 and 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 UX hurdle. So the tracks are there to kind of narrow people down and help them focus their project. And the tracks that we’re offering our Global Adoption Track, which obviously kind of looks at global adoption and scalability onboarding people education, whatever it is, it’s quite 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. They were going to host a hackathon for their event and we just thought, why don’t we just combine these things? There’s no point running to sort of simultaneous hackathons and spreading attention out. Let’s just get it done as a track. So both of the tracks have about $10,000 in prizes, or it is, I think, exactly $10,000 in prizes. So it’s 5k to the 1st place, 2.5k the 2nd, 1.5k the 3rd, and then there’s also a best design prize because 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 these technologies. We believe that’s pretty essential 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 will automatically be registered for this. And this is, like you said, there’s going to be one bitcoin to the overall winner, which is we’re calling sort of the Legend. And then we’re going to have two runners up, which is .5 BTC each. So one project itself could win up to three prizes. They could get the Legend award, which is 1 bitcoin. They could also get first place and best design in their track, which is another 6k in prizes. So one project could take home over $25,000 worth of prizes, 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.

Stephan Livera – 00:12:14:

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 in the space. So I suppose it’s like a starting track that gives them an opportunity.

Ed – 00:12:39:

Yeah, exactly. I think, to be honest, one of the ways that we wanted to really position this tournament was more of an accelerator style event. So we’re getting projects and 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 going to be hosting a bunch of workshops for makers, whether it’s how to build on Lightning, how to issue assets on taro or stable sats on alloy 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 going to have a couple of workshops on grant funding. So this is going to be given by the folks at Geyser and open sats, who you may be familiar with. And then also we’re going to do some workshops with some of the VCs. So Volga Ventures who are going to be sponsoring most of these prizes, they’re going to be doing some sort of office hours with them, with Mike from Lightning Ventures, Max from HiveMind. So immediately it’s going to be great for the 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.

Stephan Livera – 00:14:01:

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

Ed – 00:14:09:

Yeah, so there are going to be seven criteria for the projects, just to explain a little bit the timeline. People are going to hack until sort of November 24th and then we’re going to take a small pause and the judges are going to 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 a finals day. But the criteria that they’re actually going to be evaluated on is going to be sort of Bitcoin integration and scalability. There’s going to be execution of the idea, product, market fits design. So sort of UI UX, there’s going to be sort of extra rewards for a bit of spice factor. So 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 want to push people to kind of build in public and learn in public. As John kind of mentioned, there is really little sort of resources and documentation on how to actually build these types of projects immediately. If you go into the Ethereum space or the Solana space, you have a whole wide range of documents of developer resources, design resources on how to build a smart contract that does X, or how to build your first entity 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 going to be providing sort of weekly progress reports or the sort of PPPs structure 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 big updates, feature releases, maybe partnerships that they’re trying to integrate and things like that. Yeah.

Johns Beharry – 00:16:02:

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 in the judging criteria as well to figure out 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, few of them said they were missing documentation for LN-URLs, they couldn’t really understand it and stuff like that. So what we will do, since we see that, we’ll put on a workshop for that to help those projects right, and be able to direct them and stuff like that.

Stephan Livera – 00:16:40:

Yeah. And so while we’re on the topic of building in public, can you tell us a little bit about who’s participating or how many participants we have and what kinds of things they’re building.

Johns Beharry – 00:16:53:

As of right now, I think this weekend we cross 200 makers registering the amount of projects. I think there’s not of 20 so far. But one of the things that we’re going to have to figure out is how do we help these projects stay motivated? It’s a long period of time, right? It’s not a weekend hackathon, it’s a long period of time. Some people might feel like at some point midway or after a few weeks that they can’t do it or they’re going to go back to normal life and leave their project on the side. So we’re going to 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?

Ed – 00:17:47:

With regards to some of the projects that we’ve seen, maybe it’s going 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 and they automatically get returned to you. There was one on sort of Value for Value recipes that people want to do, kind of like an only fans, but for chefs, which is cool. There’s one from Dangled at Chain Case. I think they’re doing a project on no looking, which is about opening up Lightning channels in one sort of unchained transaction using things like PayJoins, Got, Ticketing and Raffle sort of platforms. There are quite a few actually. You can find them all by scrolling through some of the posts 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 Galoy. They’re trying to team up with some of the people at Collider to integrate sort of stable stats into their platform. But a lot of these projects as well hopefully are going to come out of the bitcoin designathon, which is the bitcoin design community event, which is kind of happening at the moment. And there are going to be 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 Web3, with sort of digital assets and tokens and things like that. So it’s just really the start. People are kind of formulating still forming teams. But yeah, it’s going to be really cool. I’d like to see a project built out as well on the UTXO Wallet, which I suggested, but it’s going to be cool. It’s a different mix of sort of On Chain and Lightning, which is another thing to say. There is that yes, 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.

Stephan Livera – 00:19:42:

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with that longer term if on chain eventually gets priced out. We’ll see, I mean it depends on adoption and how soon and how quickly that goes that maybe the nonmonetary 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 LN-URL. And I notice even on the website you’ve got LN-URL or as an example so 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 associated with your Lightning node. And so I know as an example, even Sparrow Wallet as an example has this idea of Auth 47, which is all kind of a similar idea but based off BIP47, but still using the public key and still logging into things off of that. So it will 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 standard that we use in Bitcoin and Lightning.

Johns Beharry – 00:20:43:

Yeah, we just need people to experiment with these technologies. Right. A BIP47 has been around for such a long time recently. There’s a kind of resurgence about using it. There’s good and bad and different arguments on whichever side. But at the end of the day let’s just use stuff, experiment with it on the application layer at least and see what could come out with it. Maybe some other bit or some better thing comes out after. But these primitives, we need to start playing around with them a little bit more to understand how they break what the design patterns and stuff. I do want to mention one thing about the projects though, it also doesn’t have to be a new project. If you have an existing project, you can jump in with that as well. And what we’re looking for is of course building and 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 want to also clarify that.

Stephan Livera – 00:21:46:

I see, because as an example I can think of cases where there are tools that aren’t necessarily part of the business, but they’re just something that other developers and builders in the space might use or a tool that individuals in the space might use. So 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?

Johns Beharry – 00:22:30:

Yeah, we got some heavy hitters, actually. So of course, the Roei Erez from Breez, we got John Travallo, Oleg, who actually came to us with the idea about I think initially he came to us and he’s like, how can we connect all these events that are happening before, and is it possible to kind of create this meta hackathon, essentially because he’s been supporting us since the beginning of. We really liked the project. Oleg’s there. We got OB from Freddie, Max Webster, a bunch of VC judges. And those guys are kind of important because, again, they’re also kind of like on the lookout for new projects in this space, right? So everyone’s incentives are kind of, like aligned up. We got Victor and Mary. I got Paco from Run with Bitcoin. There’s a panel of 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 Club Lab has been referred. Like, really awesome. We got like this, I think not last weekend. The weekend before, there was this thing called Club Weekend. And just before the lessons of Lightning kicked off, they were doing 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 Miami. There’s a Club TLV as well in Israel. So 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.

Stephan Livera – 00:24:41:

And I notice also there is a guide on Bolt.fun, so it looks like it’s similar to an overview of Lightning and various concepts enlightening are being explained here. So what’s the intent there?

Johns Beharry – 00:24:56:

Well, I think that was part of the genesis, right? The idea of the guide was basically a dump of some research from the formation of the Bitcoin Design Guide. We were just, like, dropping notes in there. Those notes were 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, if you have designers in one corner, developers in another corner, separate communities maybe there’s a way that we could bring them together because there’s a lot of complexities about the technologies that designers kind of like trying to shy away from. And if you’re working in a startup or a project or whatever, you kind of have to face them head on because you’re working on a singular team with these folks with it instead of like separate silos. So, yeah, it was really degenerative. And what were the intention of it, I guess, was to be that like a little bit more technical documentation than the bitcoin designer, but enough for an application developer or someone who just wants to go a little bit more technical than just, like, the UI components.

Stephan Livera – 00:26:08:

Okay, well, we’re here actually. Could you just tell us a little bit about the bitcoin design community for people? Maybe they knew they didn’t really know what that is. What’s that and how’s that working?

Johns Beharry – 00:26:18:

Yeah, so the bitcoin design community is basically a group of folks who are interested in helping bitcoin reach mass adoption. And how does it do that? We’re going to need to have better user experience. The technology is quite complex. We need to double down a little bit for folks to be able to use to use in a safe way. And there are a lot of foot guns and things that applications out there that can make people lose a lot of their money. So the bigger 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 Sigma components and quality UI case, etc. That just allows designers to join the field and be able to contribute to those UI and UX problems. It’s about 3500 people now, I think, so, yeah, it’s growing. And if you want to do like, user research, just design explorations or some artistic stuff, it’s kind of a place for you. Developers already have their place on GitHub, but we need kind of like more creative and design oriented people coming in as well to get that other perspective.

Stephan Livera – 00:27:47:

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 some kind of ongoing meta hackathon, hopefully.

Johns Beharry – 00:28:05:

So it’s a lot of work and is handling a lot of the operations or the majority of operations on it? Yeah, 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 help foster this kind of innovation and onboard new people. So ideally, we’re able to do it once 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 again it’s about sustainability and helping the projects continue to exist after the event.

Stephan Livera – 00:28:48:

So 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 or building down any particular pathways?

Ed – 00:29:00:

That’s a hard question to answer. I think it would be nice to see a myriad of different projects get worked on. We are huge proponents of unchained privacy as well, so it be cool to see some more standardizations of applications on the sort of the base layer, whether it’s Coinjoins, Payjoins that are labeling or sort of contact management, that type of thing. We had a really cool project in the previous hackathon which kind of did that as well. And then I guess when it comes to Lightning, obviously your first thought might be 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, sort of a website interaction or a UX interaction. I guess also with the recent updates of sort of Taro RGB stable stats, I think we’re going to probably see more use cases of things like community banking maybe sort of getting more assets onto Bitcoin. I think that whilst I think I probably speak for both Johns and I were 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 the application layer and get people sort of playing around with some of these tools. So there is probably going to 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 LN-URL or I’ve talked a lot about sort of passwordless authentication and this as a sort of a standard UX practice coming into Web2 as well as Web3 applications. I would like to see more of this done as well. I think there’s an awesome project by a developer called Dodo, it’s called Zero Login. I think he’s going to be entering into the tournament with that and it’s essentially kind of abstracting password of authentication but obviously using sort of Bitcoin as the back end 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’re using bitcoin is more kind of like the rails of a more sort of sturdy rails of Web3 or the next generation of kind of applications that we see being built.

Johns Beharry – 00:31:41:

I think it’s going to be quite interesting when Taro gets properly released and stuff like that. What the perception folks are going to have for the things that are going to be getting built in it? There’s a big narrative within the community now shifting towards like stable coins being necessary and stuff, but people are going to be minting their own shit coins. It’s going to happen on Bitcoin. So that’s going to 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 strong with them over the years. But, yeah, it’s going to be some interesting times ahead.

Stephan Livera – 00:32:24:

Right. I think there’s a lot of things that will be controversial for some people. Like, it depends on the view. I’ve heard some people say, like my friend NVK over at Coincard, 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 stable coins or don’t promote don’t spend time and effort promoting those. I could also see some people disagree even about the terminology. Right. So Web3 is the branding, is the name tarnished. Like, because we saw, for example, Block and I think TBD come out with this whole idea of Web 5.0 and kind of like trolling the Web3 messaging. But nevertheless, it will be interesting to see what happens with Taro. And that’s the other one. I know some people in the community even have seen people critique that idea of saying, is it even in Lightning per se? But nevertheless, if it’s a technology that people are interacting with on their Lightning node, it will be an interesting question to see what kind of wallets, what kind of applications come out that are using Lightning, Lightning standards, things like LN-URL at the application level to provide a service. And I think the broader point that is an important one, I think it’s to echo the one that our friend Ari has made from some of Bitcoin, where he’s saying bitcoin needs more developers. We need ways to increase and improve the mindset 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.

Ed – 00:34:04:

Yeah, exactly. 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 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 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 informs your perception of how you can use these technologies and what practices you should implement or even. As Johns said, like the ethos that kind of comes in the bitcoin space I think is a really strong one and I think it’s good that it’s strong and I think I was even looking at kind of bits 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 that 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 going to be done on the Lightning Network and I’m kind of looking forward to seeing those things come. And when you look at the knock on effect of, for example, like Do Kwon’s project, which kind of had this huge catastrophic failure earlier in the year and I found myself thinking, oh 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 bitcoin. So it doesn’t really matter if it’s kind of like a shit coin existing parallel to bitcoin or if it’s actually built on bitcoin itself. 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 going to give you constructive criticism on your projects or we’re going to tread with caution and implement that kind of slightly slower. More study bitcoin ethos. Which I think a lot of people want. But maybe also kind of give people a bit of a poke with the innovation stick as well and try and see some things experimented with.

Stephan Livera – 00:36:35:

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 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?

Johns Beharry – 00:37:30:

You can find me, @johnsBeharry, pretty much everywhere. J-O-H-N-S-B-E-H-A-R-R-Y Twitter on both phones. That’s where I pretty much hang out in the crowded community as well.

Ed – 00:37:42:

Yeah, same goes here. You can find me pretty much every online, Twitter, Discord. My handle on Twitter is @zapp_ed, z-a-p-p underscore ed. And I’m beth488 on Discord and GitHub as well.

Stephan Livera – 00:37:56:

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

Johns Beharry – 00:38:00:

Thanks so much.

Ed – 00:38:01:

Thanks for having us.


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