Coffee Date with LNbits

Hello, and welcome back to Freedom Tech Friday, a weekly live and interactive show hosted on the ungovernable misfits feeds. We go live for one hour every Friday at 9AM eastern and 2PM UK time, but you can catch up on the Ungovernable Misfits podcast feed after the fact.

On Freedom Tech Friday, we like to cover the latest news and trends for anything relating to Freedom Technologies. That could be anything from Bitcoin or Monero, encrypted messengers, privacy tools, and everything in between.

Essentially, if there is a news item tool or topic that can help you take back some control in today's digital Panopticon, then we wanna talk about it. My name is q and a, and I'm head of customer experience at Foundation, where we build Bitcoin focused sovereignty tools.

And as always, I am joined by my good friends, Max, who is the head honcho over at the, I nearly said Cakewallet team then because I was looking at Seth, at the Ungovernable Empire and also Seth who is COO at Cakewallet.

This is a live and interactive show and you can help steer the conversation by commenting live, pre submitting questions or topics on socials, boosting the show via podcasting two point o apps, sending in your tips, and just sharing the show with your friends and family.

Top support from the last show with Crypto Squid from the Start Nine team, that's not correct, Comes from l l four at Fountain FM who streamed 1,100 sats. Thank you for your support. So without further ado, I'll bring our guest on very shortly. But, Max, Seth, how are both doing?

I am ecstatic today. We have one of our probably longest standing guests and good friend joining us. So looking forward to catch up and also learn what the fuck he's been doing all this time that I still don't understand. So, yeah, excited for today.

Likewise. I've, I'd used LMbits way back in the day. I haven't actually followed it too closely recently, so I'm really curious to learn a little bit more. I know they they played around with Spark some too, so curious to ask questions about that. And, yeah, looking forward to it. I'm here. We're here. Excited.

So you drop in just at the just at the nick of time and completely threw me off my flow because I tried to carry on reading the intro and get you into the office sorry, into the stream at the same time, and it just the the wheels completely fell off. It's bold moves. I I timed it perfectly. Yeah. Maximum distraction.

Mission accomplished. Alright. Well, this week, we are talking about, yeah, I guess, arguably one of the most quietly influential pieces of software in the Lightning ecosystem. If you have ever received a zap paid for

paid using Bitcoin and meet up or topped up a lightning wallet from a four seat or used the point of sale terminal at a conference, there's a decent chance that you would have, whether you know it or not, used some form of LN bits infrastructure somewhere in the stack.

It started out I don't actually know where, maybe we'll find that out in a minute. But it started out way back when as a hobbyist project and has grown into a full platform. Self hosted lightning account system, developer toolkit, extension marketplace.

They now have hosted software services, plug and play hardware box. We're gonna learn about it all. It's I've heard it called the Swiss army knife of lightning, and I tend to agree. And today, we've got one of the people closest to the project to walk us through the latest and greatest.

Joining us is mister Black Coffee, and he is gonna do some live demos and talk to us about LMbits so you can actually see this thing in action rather than just hearing us describe it. Black Coffee, welcome to the show, mate. How are you doing? Oh, yeah. I'm alright. Thank you. How are you?

No complaints. It's Friday, the sun's out, and well, that's that's enough for me. Yeah. All happy happy to have you back on. I I was thinking, we've we've had you on Freedom Tech Friday once already, haven't we?

No. I don't think on Freedom Tech Friday, but like, a couple of years ago, probably just on one of the normal podcast episodes. One of the other millions of episodes that Max has been on. Been on a few times, I'm sure, haven't you?

Yeah. Probably past you in somewhere.

He's also the ungovernable tech support if things go really, really wrong. He's the man we call. I I feel like anybody that has you in their signal contact list or automatically comes Is tech support. Yeah. Unofficial tech support.

And I was tech support. Yeah. I categorize you in in terms of sort of helpfulness and in what areas you can fix things. And all of you here get leaned on quite hard, actually. Don't we all know it?

Alright. Anyway, let's get back to business. Coffee, for for anybody who's never touched it, in plain language, like, give us give us the LN bits elevator pitch. And maybe a little bit about the origin story because we were hoping to get Ben on with us, but he was otherwise engaged. So we we took what we could get.

Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Like, the the shit then. What's selling bits then? It's difficult to sort of summarize in a in a sentence, but we we title it as, a lightning accounting system. And so what it is, it's a piece of software that sits on top of a a lightning funding source.

That lightning funding source could be sort of one of 20 that we support, you know, whether that's core lightning, l and d, Phoenix, Spark, ARC. Now we're about to release ARC support. And we also have a load of custodial lightning funding sources as well that we we support.

And what, like, LNbits does is it adds an API layer on top of these funding sources and the user interface that allows you to do so much more with a Lightning funding source than just having a Lightning wallet.

So I guess as a short summary, that's what it is. I've heard it described, and I think Ben uses this quite often. And I and I don't know whether he still does, but back in the day, he used to call it, like, WordPress for your Lightning node.

And that always really resonated with me. I don't know I don't know whether you hate that or not, but, like, it's like

the it's like a toolkit that you can sit on top of your lightning node that enables you to do untold amounts of cool shit, and that that untold amount of cool shit seems to be consistently growing, which is why we wanted to to get you back on.

I don't know whether you actually agree with that terminology, whether you think it makes sense. Yeah. I think it does in the fact that it's open source software. It's MIT licensed. It's, yeah, it's open for anyone to use, and you can extend the functionality by adding extensions into it.

Yeah. I think it is a good way of describing it and just try and ignore the, any issues that people have with WordPress because it's very popular piece of software, but it does have its issues.

Yeah. LMBits is, like, the best parts of WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. That's Not the parts that everyone hates, which is, like, running it and the community and everything else. But LMBits is all the good parts. It's all the good parts. It's what WordPress wishes it was. There we go. That's the tagline.

Yep.

Alright. So so who who who are the main kind of audiences? Who who would benefit from using LNbits? Like, what what can people what are the most common use cases that you see, I guess? I guess the the community chatter that I tend to get involved with and see is people who are

running LNbits as part of a business. So whether they have a bar or a cafe or something like that, and they're accepting Bitcoin payments. People who are developing software because we have such a good API on LNbits, it allows them to really quickly add lightning payments to whatever application they're they're building themselves.

And, also, just people running it for themselves or for their family. Yeah. So those are probably the core user groups.

And what what so you mentioned merchants there. Are we are we talking, like I don't wanna draw parallels here, but, like, the the most common one that people will hear of, like, BTC pay server, is it is, like, similar sort of functionality, or do you guys, like, take any step further, or is there any differentiators there?

I guess it's similar in some ways. I I think there's a lot of things that you can do with LMbits that you can't do with B2C Pay in a merchant setup. So, you know, we have a point of sale application that works really well on touchscreen devices and with inventory management and all this sort of stuff. And then integration with external

peripherals, so, like, receipt printers,

yeah, various types of touchscreen devices that merchants can have in in store that LMBits is now working really well for. I think it's it's come on so far in the last, probably, three or four years. So for anyone who's not run LMBits in a while, I definitely encourage them to give it a go. It's it's much, much different now.

So there's some sorry. Just real quick here. I think there's some benefits of being a little bit more,

like, focused on one specific thing. Like, I love BTC pay server because you can do pretty much anything. Like, we use it to to accept Lightning payments, but also Onchain, also CCash, also Monero. Like, it it lets you do a lot more, but whatever system gets that

flexible, you do lose a little bit of the the focus. And, again, something that the elements does have the advantage. If you if you're just doing Lightning, it's gonna be much more crafted for that than something like BTCPay would be, which, yeah, always pros and cons, but it it helps us stay a little bit more more clear.

Yeah. I think so. And it's it's a an easier piece of software to run than I've always found BCPay to be. I guess I've not run BCPay server in a in a few years or a couple years now. But I did find it to be quite heavy, not to talk down BCPay

at all because it's an excellent piece of software. But LNbits can be pretty, you know, sort of five, ten minute job to get it up and running, if you know what you're doing. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned it in in that sense.

What what are some of the ways that or maybe list them all. What are the ways in which people can get their hands on LMbits? Like, how can you install it or run it? Like, do you need a server? What does that look like?

Yeah. So I I guess the way that most people have been running it in the past has been either running on a home load of some sort, whether that's like a a Raspberry Blitz, an Umbral, start nine, something like that, or spinning something themselves in VPS.

And often, the way that people are running on VPS is rather than running a full Lightning node, they're running something like Phoenix d on that VPS at the same at the same time to access the funding source.

And then, you know, we have some so LLMbits being open source project. We also have a commercial side where we have an LMbits software service product, which is, like, a two click maybe a couple more than two clicks, but a few clicks to get your own LMbits instance up and running with a funding source included.

And we've recently released a piece of hardware that we're calling LMbits box. There's sort of a plug and play LMbits in a box that you can just plug in and get going with really. Okay. Interesting. So so it's oh, nice. So you can you can buy a a presumably, it's like a node in a box tailored to you guys.

You what does that look like? You just buy it, plug it in, give it some power and some Ethernet, and then you're away. It opens up with with with LMbits as, a blank state. Is that like, walk us through that. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly I mean, I can screen share if you like. Let's do it. If you wanna have a look at that. Well, I'll

turn my camera on without absolutely doxing myself. Let's see what we've got. While you're doing that, does that mean that if you buy one of these boxes, you can do everything that you might do with,

like, a start nine or something like that and connect your normal wallets to it, etcetera? Or is it more it's just LM bit? It's all very nice. Yes. This is all, like it's only a small little piece of hardware. Yeah. So 10 centimeters or so in dimensions. But you've taken some

taken some inspiration from foundation there with your color scheme, I think. Yeah. It's possible. Yeah. It's very nice. Yeah. Sorry. What was the question, Max?

If you buy one of these boxes, can you use it in the same way, like collect connecting your hardware and normal wallets, etcetera, and running a node, etcetera? Or is it just can you only run LMbit software, or can you add other bits that you might on a on a different node? Yeah. Okay. It's dedicated LMbits hardware. Okay. Okay.

Yeah. We we've not got it. You know, we're not we're not going mad and starting to run some full home computing setup with this. It is specific for LN bits.

So I was just I was only wondering, like, if someone just wanted to do the most basic thing of, like, I want to run a node and I wanna connect my hardware to it, and I want all the LN bits, they still need to go out and buy a separate thing to do that or no?

Well, I mean so this piece hardware comes with a lightning funding source. It it comes packaged with Spark or Phoenix or ARC out of the box.

Does that answer that question? It does. Yeah. Yeah. It does. Okay. Trying to think I'm trying to think, like, five things at once here, which is not not making my job easy. So

well, I'll quickly show you this just so you you got an idea of what this is. So, you know, this is with the Allen Bitsbox, we've got this sort of, like, first install setup wizard. The idea being that, you know, a lot of home users,

they just want some to plug in, and it's an issue I always had. You want me to plug in and go, and it works on Clearnet.

You don't wanna be messing around on terminal, Max, do you? Or Not really, mate. I I've done enough of that in my life, and it's never been pleasant. We don't we don't want him messing around on terminal. Because if he messes around on terminal, that means we have to mess around on his terminal,

then it just it all goes south from there. So It's true. It's true. So the idea being you can pretty much do everything you need to through the web interface. So, you know, we can select a funding source here. This is the the setup process.

Get your seed phrase, type one in, or sort of get randomly generated one here. Set an SSH password, and then that's the setup completed. Then we can go into the admin panel.

And whilst LMbits is starting, which it it takes a few seconds to start just to get the funding source and whatnot. Coming online so far. Yeah. I mean, I I think it just it's simple. And then we can we got this feature, which is we're calling it tunnel, right, which allows you to get a clear net URL.

So because, again, this is another issue that I always had with, you know, you're running something on a on a home server, trying to get a connection to clear that other people can use when you're or yourself when you're away from home can be a bit of a pain. Like, things work for a little while. They don't work. TOR is not that great.

But this this reverse proxy actually works pretty well. So if I start that tunnel service So is that a paid service hosted by you guys, essentially, so that people can proxy from their own house, like, out to to clear net, essentially.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's exactly right. And and what does that run? Like, is that monthly? Is it, like, an account balance type thing? Or Yeah. So you can add credits for however whatever period of time you want. That's one day or

a year. You know? And I don't think we've really finally decided on pricing for that. We sold a 100 stats per day. That's that's how it starts at set at the moment. But

That's pretty cool. I I like that because, yeah, as somebody who's messed around with this sort of stuff and wants certain things accessible via ClearNet, like, the whole tunnel side of things with VPSs and all that sort of stuff is is a headache. There's no two ways around it. So I I like that approach as a, you know, a simple

pay this invoice and get this service nice. Yeah. It's pretty neat. And we do have tour access on on this bit of hardware as well. Other stuff in here, I'll quickly run through, like, what the system information.

And then this, which is quite neat, I think, like, a a full recovery center so you can create an encrypted backup, have scheduled backups running, and then restore from these backups very easily. So if you nerf your system or do something daft, you can you can fix that. And because this so this piece of hardware is all built on LixOS.

You sort of got these reproducible builds that make it really easy to upgrade, roll back to previous states. It's just a nice piece of hardware, and it it's really how how software that's being used for money should be being built, in my opinion.

And those those back ups, are they all kind of manual and and low well, I can see you can schedule it, but it's all that local, basically. So you'd plug something physically into the box.

At the moment, if I if I created a a backup, this gives you a zip file to to download locally. Okay. So presumably sorry. Go ahead. So presumably, that's kind of, like, the configuration. It's not like the

the well, I suppose there is no blockchain data if you default into Spark. Right? That's right. Yeah. So it's taking a it's taking the Spark database and the seed phrase and, you know, that sort of stuff that you need to get Spark back into the space it was previously, but there's no, yeah, there's no full blockchain.

Nice. Okay. Alright. I'll let you I'll let you continue, like, going through this this part of the the showcase, and then I wanna talk about funding sources. Yeah. I mean, that's it pretty much. I've I've done that, so let's talk funding sources.

Yeah. So walk us through the possibilities. Obviously, you've mentioned default is is Spark. Like, why did you you make that choice? What's the I mean, I suppose it's the obvious one, but I'll let you spell it out for the for the listeners.

I I think for for me when I was building this, Spark was the funding source that made most sense and was easiest to integrate for this particular bit of hardware. The the SDK was good. It pretty much it did everything we needed it to, and it followed the documentation. It it behaved as expected.

And for the hardware this is running on, it's like, Spark just works well. What we have started doing, and you probably saw that in the configuration, but it's not released into the main branch yet, It's having support for Phoenix and for ARC as well.

Phoenix is working. ARC is currently in is available to test release, but not quite there with that yet. I have seen this the ARC have released their SDK now, and it seems pretty stable from what I've seen in testing.

Quick question on that actually. For Arc, is that specifically Arcade or is that seconds bark infrastructure? It is the Arcade SDK. Okay. Okay. Makes sense. Makes sense. Could you did you bring your screen share back up? Like, what is is it a binary choice for users, or are they able to switch?

Like, what does that kinda look like? I guess, is there a migration pro process? Like, if they obviously, they start on Spark and they think, you know what? I actually wanna connect this to an LN Dino that I now run. Mhmm. You know, you what does that kinda look like for the user?

Yeah. So can you see my screen share? Right? Yep. So this is the sort of the beauty of LNbits and, I think is that you can at any point that you want, you can switch funding sources.

So let's say, yeah, you you start on Spark and it's great, but you want to move to your own fully self hosted Lightning node. You can literally go into LNbits and change your funding source. So here, you know, this is where you can configure all the funding sources. So you might go, okay. I'm gonna have call Lightning

there, and you'll just configure call Lightning. And you're up and running pretty much straight away.

Can this actually can this run all of those back ends internally? Like, if I wanna use Core Lightning, can I have, like, it run Core Lightning and set it all up in the background, or is that something where it it normally would rely on a a remote core lighting or that's being run run separately? Yeah. This is all being run separately.

We did experiment with adding Spark as a a process that would run within LMbits, but we just didn't like that real tight correlation between these two piece piece of software. I think it makes more sense to have them as separate piece of software.

So sorry. It's just so I'm clear. It it looks like Spark was running alongside LNbits.

This But I I meant, do you have to run like, do I would I have to know how to run Core Lightning, or is that something that that LNbits as a tool could set up alongside LNbits as a service? I see. No. You would have to run Core Lightning separately on whatever machine that you're running on. Okay.

But, like, Spark, Phoenix d, I'm assuming, and ARC would be something where it'll do all the configuration for you. Yeah. That's right. Within this LN bits box products, which I just done with before, that's part of that product.

Okay. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense because, obviously, those are a little bit simpler than running correlating or LND or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. There's a question from Bon on Twitter that and he asks

of course, I've just lost it now. Oh, he said, is the the reverse proxy paid service, is that exclusive to the box, or is that part of all LNbit installs? No. We do have it as an extension.

I'll see if can dig it out here. We call it TunnelMeOut, which is yeah. It's it's not it's not being pulled into the vested extensions yet, but it is an extension called TunnelMeOut, and it allows you to run that from any LNbits instance.

Nice. Okay. Cool. Well, that was a perfect segue because the next thing on my list was extensions. Obviously, we've got hours and hours worth just talking about all of these. So maybe let's, like, showcase some of your your favorites and their their kind of main use cases that people will get the

the best benefit from. And and before you do that, I just gotta say, it's been a while since I looked at the the interface, and it's come on such a long way. It looks great.

Oh, thanks. Yeah. I think it's it's nicer. It's cleaner. It's easier to use than it than it was. And managing extensions is totally different to how it used to be done. So just while you're pulling these up, extensions basically

correct me if I'm wrong. They're just apps for like, little apps or plugins for LMbits that all have specific functionality, you know, and they're all customized. Again, harking back to the kind of WordPress

analogy we we drew earlier. Is that, like, a fair kind of summary of them? Yeah. That's I mean, I I think that's a really good summary in that it allows you to turn LNbits into a piece of software that does what you wanted to do rather than doing everything.

Nice. Okay. Well, let's see some of your your favorites or the most commonly used ones. Okay. I guess, probably, you know, we talked about merchants before. We have this point of sale extension, which allows you to run a a point of sale interface for your for your shop or for your business.

So what we can do here, you know, you can imagine this on an iPad or mobile phone. On a on a mobile device, you just get this this sort of keypad interface, but, you know, on on a larger screen, you get this sort of thing where you have some coffee and cake.

You know, you got a tan there, mate. I'm looking good, aren't I? Yeah. I had a horrible helicopter crash to use, but, you know, so if I pay this, there you go. You get the payment coming through.

I mean, that's that's point of sale. So what we also do have in here is we have this extension called inventory, which allows you to manage a common inventory across a webshop, again, across a physical location as well. We do also have a a webshop extension.

I I won't demo that right now because I'm not set up for it. But yeah. I mean, that's the point of sale. What else we got? The Shotspaces server. So I don't know where that name came from, but

it's nice to create invoices. I'm sure you've seen this sort of thing before. So we we can create an invoice. So expiry time. All this payment's gonna go into. And then we're gonna get an invoice that this is a shareable invoice so I can share this URL with people, and they can go and pay it.

This can be on chain or with Lightning. You know? So so LMbits is Lightning first, but we're always improving the on chain side of things. And we've got some work coming up in the near future to to make a big improvement to how on chain payments work. So I won't go too much into that right now. So yeah.

So that's SaaS pay. The really good thing with with SaaS pay and with LMbits in general because everything's API first with a user interface. On top of we have this API. So we have extensions for SaaS pay. So everyone for LMbits that allow you to add support to ecommerce platforms like WooCommerce.

So if you're running a WooCommerce store, you can use Allen Bits to accept payments for for products on an ecommerce shop.

Right. Let's see what else I'm gonna do. Yeah. I mean, she'll go through some lost stuff. I mean, I would love to see that. Alright. Yep.

We'll get you there, Max. As would the the the the people watching live on Nosta. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what we do, we got we got a number of Nostra extensions, but I'll focus specifically on some related to Zaps, I guess.

So if it goes to Jumbo Social, I'll just create some, yeah, whatever, backed up, some random account. What I can do is I can connect my Allan Bits wallet to my master client and and also create lightning pain lightning address for accepting payments. So if I just

and create this lightning address and go for misfits, Gonna have variable payments here. Maybe someone's feeling generous and set that. So what I can do now within Jumble how do I change my profile here?

I

can also connect a using Muscle Wallet Connect. I can create connection. People may have seen this sort of thing before. I don't think I'm doxing anything here, which is pretty good.

Seems like you might have done this once or twice before. I had to practice because I don't wanna look like it. You see, you you've just completed more than Max would in six months. Thirty seconds.

This is too many years sitting in front of a computer as well. Hey. Listen. Bond's struggling with Nostril as well. He can't Yeah. I saw that. Livestreaming. It's not just me. It's not just me. And when you said, oh, yeah. People are watching us in livestream. In my head, I went unlikely, and there you are.

Oh, well, I'm sure they'll figure it out. So, yeah, I mean, look. I can I can zap q and a now? This is gonna take payments from my wallet.

There you go. Payment's gone. If I look at my wallet, I'll see that payment just as as proof that I'm not fudging anything. Like, zap myself as well because I've got a lightning address that's hosted by I have to write something. I've gotta write something.

I'm gonna zap wash myself. There you go. Gotta get those those zap stats up. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And there's that payment coming in. So, yeah, I can do that. And then here you go. Let's see if anyone wants to grab some stats. God, there's 8,000 stats there. Right? If someone can grab that, and then we have connection act fast people.

Yeah. So I didn't realize the balance is that high, but someone's gonna do well. So, you know, if you're running Zeus or BlueWallet or I mean, there's a lot of wallets that's pulling on DHub now as well. You can you can connect here.

And then and use LMbits through through DHub. So I think I think I'm not gonna run through loads more extensions. There are so many extensions. We have vetted extensions, which are extensions that sort of the Ellenbits team have reviewed, and there's nothing fishy in there. It's possible for people to build their own and share their own.

They're not vetted. People wanna vet them themselves, and that's probably what they should be doing, fully run it on something with with real money.

Nice. Okay. A couple of questions that have come through. We've got Observer in the live in the Nossa live chat. Which mobile app do you recommend for spending over LMbits? You just briefly mentioned there that's about Zeus, but what are the other options?

I don't know. The way I tend to use it is just through a mobile browser on my mobile device. So So you what do you save that as, like, a progressive web app, or is it that you just open? It is available available as a PWA, so you kinda store it, but I'll just use a normal browser.

You know, I was testing Zeus yesterday. Zeus worked really well. I think there's an AlbyGo app. That was also pretty good. So what does that look like to to connect something like Zeus, which again is is a bit of a Swiss army knife tool for Lightning? Like, what does that connection flow look like? Is it just a QR code scan?

With Nostal Wallet Connect, so you can connect Zeus in a number of ways, either with L and D Hub, which you think you need to clear that URL for or with Nosta Wallet Connect. So if you got if you're using L and D Hub, you will scan that QR code, but that requires that clear that URL. If you're,

I think, if you're using Northwell Connect, it's also a QR code scan. Right? Yes. And then b you would you don't need a a Clearnet connection for Northwell Connect.

Nice. Okay. Another one from observer said, is it possible to choose the receiving lightning channel if you create an invoice on a specific mobile app?

No. Assuming that you're not using something like Spark. No. Not within Ellen, but she would have our functionality in there. I think probably because we're supporting so many different funding sources, getting, you know, into that sort of specific stuff.

Yeah. That's something we do. It's something we could add in the future. And one of the things we do have and I've not been able to demo is if you're using a a funding source like CLN or LND, we do have some channel management functionality within LNbits. So you can manage liquidity and opening and closing channels within

the LNbits interface.

Sweet. Well, the the questions are coming in thick and fast here. Is there any possibilities to receive over blinded paths in a mobile app? I think it's probably the same answer again, is it? Yeah. I'm afraid so.

And then the last one for now before we move on. What are the two recommended ways to run an l run to run LNbits on a VPS and the funding source to hide the IP of your funding source, but have a clear net domain for your LNbits instance and have privacy.

No Phoenix d okay. There's a lot there. I think, basically, you said what's the most private way to run it on a VPS is what I kinda glean from that. Yeah. I I get an idea of what the question is. I think probably an s h tunnel between whatever home like, I'm I'm extrapolating

here, but I imagine someone's running something like call lining at home. Yeah. Running an s h tunnel from that funding or from that CLN server out to your VPS and then connecting that to to LM bits. And I think if you're if you're receiving if you got your CLN node set up for TOR only, that shouldn't be doxing any IP addresses of your

CLN's node, I don't think. Makes sense to me. Alright. Well, we've we've still got plenty of time left, so maybe bring your screen share back up and showcase us some more of those GC extensions.

Alright. Well, something I can share, which is not really extensions, and there's no ratios, mate. Anything you want, just keep it decent. And then I'm probably gonna be done after this. I mean, we had a big release today, and this is not really on the open source software project side of things.

But we we have this element of SaaS. For people who are not wanting to get their hands dirty with VPSs and all that sort of gunk is we have a software as a service product at myelmbits.com, where someone can create an account and spin up an elm bits instance.

Currently, only with Spark as a available funding source with a with subscriptions that are payable in Bitcoin or fiat payments. So and they can also bring their own domain names, whether that's a subdomain or a full domain to that. I'm not gonna go and do this because it's $40.

But for a merchant, that's not an unreasonable amount, don't think. So you can you can create your own.

One question I have about that, I I do wanna ask another question following up that. But real quick on that, if I spin up an HelloBit service that way, and let's say I'm using Spark, are my private keys looking on that host then?

With Spark, they are. Yes. Yeah. Okay. That's what I was thinking. I didn't think there was any way to do, like, a

a watch only wallet in that scenario. So, obviously, there's trust there, but it's not you're not targeting the the ultra self sovereign individual. You're trying to help a a merchant get onboarded and spun up quickly or that sort of thing. Exactly. You know, with this stuff, I I I think the freedom is in

the freedom of choice of how you want to operate this stuff. And, you know, maybe you don't have to have the perfect self sovereign setup. You might be willing to accept the trade off of, okay. It's not fully self custodial, but it's self custodial enough in the case of Spark. And maybe that's something we can talk about.

And and with our own bits, like I mentioned before, you've always got this opportunity to to change funding sources to something that is more under your control.

Yeah. I'd kinda act I actually would love to kind of hear your thoughts about Spark. You mentioned that was the the obvious choice at the time when you were building that portion of it out. But what was the, like, what was the rationale behind that? How do you think about it, and how are you thinking about it long term?

Yeah. I think I think it's just in this sort of a useful position, right, between a custodial solution. Like yeah. Between the soft between the custodial solution and a self custodial solution. We got this in between, and some people will call Spark self custodially,

and I don't really think it is. I thought it was sort of, like, semi self custodial. There is a potential to have some funds stuck in Spark. But for a lot of users, it it really is a good solution.

You know, you will have seen the vast majority of people who are using Bitcoin, using Lightning, on mobile using Wallet Satoshi. That was because it was easy to use. You you open the app and it works. Now Wallet Satoshi have moved to Spark,

and that's been a good choice for them because for most people, yeah, payments might be a little bit slower, but it still it still works. It's it does the job for most people. And I think it's easy to get stuck in this way of thinking ways of, like, I'm doing Bitcoin properly, because it's fully self custodial. I'm running it for myself.

It's an absolute pain in the ass. I've gotta manage liquidity, but I'm brilliant. And I don't think it needs to be like that. I think there's there's this in between where it works, and it's good enough.

Yeah. I think for kind of for too long, and this may feel sacrilegious, for anyone listening, but forget it too long. Like, even I viewed self custody as this, like, binary thing, but essentially everything outside of on chain Bitcoin where you hold the keys and run your own node

has some trust trade offs. And it's something that has just not really been commonly talked about. Like, even running a Lightning node yourself has trust trade offs. If your node goes offline and you're not paying attention and your channel partner decides to close that node at that channel state,

you can lose money. Like, there there are ways that essentially everything outside of on chain Bitcoin where you hold the keys and you run a node

can have issues where you could lose money or funds could be stolen. And that's something that I think has has not often been kind of accepted, and that there there isn't this, like, binary. Either it's perfectly self custodial or it's not at all, but there's

really, on chain is, like, the perfect self custody because that is the one thing where you can have almost no trust, in any third party, but pretty much everything else relies on some trust or some responsibility for you to do something correctly so that you cannot lose funds.

And I I I do like like, I think Spark and Arc both fit in that in that spectrum relatively close to the full self custody of Onchain, not all the way there. There are trust trade offs. There there is a trust in a third a third party that theoretically

could do something to steal funds, but you do have unilateral exit. You do have the ability to prove if someone were to steal funds and discredit them. It's a it's an interesting set of trade offs for sure. And then like you said, it's it's kind of like on that spectrum.

It's it's not fully on chain trust minimization, but it's it's good enough for most users in finding the solution that meets users' needs without going full custodial, I think, is really important, and that's that's one of the reasons why I do love that. It's also, like, the average person gives over ownership and completely trusts

organizations to do everything for them. And then when you're coming at it from, like, a Bitcoin perspective, you're trying to hold on to every single bit of control. And sometimes, I'd argue, like, if you're trying to onboard someone and say, oh, you've got a coffee shop and you wanna accept Bitcoin or Lightning.

Like, nine times out of 10, if I tried to explain to a normal person how to set up a node and manage their channels and do this and do that, they'd be like, fuck this. Especially for, like, the one or two people in a day who might actually try and spend Bitcoin if that.

And then what's the risk? Okay. There's, like, $10 there, which could potentially get stolen. That's not gonna, like, ruin their life. And so as long as it's, used alongside, proper storage and, like, proper, self custody for the amounts that matter,

I think we never get to a stage where it's more commonly used if we don't have these trade offs, in my opinion anyway, from what I've seen and being the the nontechnical one and breaking things and have just pain, pain, pain.

Yeah. The people aren't gonna do it. And and I I do wanna just add too, like, that that's the same the argument you just made is the same one I've heard people say for why they're fine with onboarding people to completely custodial solutions, to little all of Satoshi, to other things like that. And I I kind of hate the argument

unless you're talking about something that is still relatively trust minimized, which I think Spark and Arc do put into. Like, it's not as easy as just one person decides your Bitcoin is now theirs In either of those systems, you have ways to protect yourself, and it relies on multiple entities working together to try and steal funds.

And you can prove that those funds were stolen as well because it's not just in someone else's database. It actually has an on chain tie that you can see move fund see move. So I think that that's why, like, that argument to me is okay now. Yeah. It's it's much more difficult. Likely than your bank. Like, it's it's a 100%

less likely to happen than your bank just saying, we don't like something. For whatever reason, we're freezing your funds as fuck all you can do about it, speak to our AI support for the next two months, and we'll we'll we'll decide whether you can have your money and make payroll or not. Like Yeah. It's definitely better than that.

So and that's what you're competing against at the end of the day. Yeah. For sure. I think so. I I think, you know, by telling people they have to run their own full mode, you're doing so many people a disservice.

And I think that narrative is starting to drop a little bit. It's all this no true Scotsman fallacy.

I mean, this is a this is a deeper discussion for another time prop probably, but you don't have to define yourself by by Bitcoin and being fully self custodial. It's okay for stuff just to work.

Is it?

It's not. I I would say it is. So, I mean, for me, personally, when I'm running LMPs, I'm running that with Phoenix. And there's that trade off. Right? You're using an LSP. There's some privacy trade offs there. But for me, it works, and I'm not spending three hours a week managing channels.

Yep. Yep. Yeah. I definitely definitely understand that. I did wanna get into a little bit of, like, what is it like actually working on EllaBits, and how did you how did you get started in that? Like, what is what is your day to day look like there?

Because I know a lot of people kind of see from the outside what it's like to work on open source projects, but don't know if we get to hear from people who are actually, like, in the in the weeds there.

So I'd love to to hear a little bit more about, like, how you got into LNbits and and what you're mainly doing there now and what it's like to actually work on it. Alright. Yeah. I mean, it's brilliant. I'm I'm feel so fortunate to be able to do the work that that I do.

And I owe a lot to Benarc and other people involved in the project for for letting me be involved and getting paid to work on the software. It it really is fantastic. I get how do I get involved? I've sort of been contributing to all in bits for probably nearly six years now.

Initially, around some of the hardware, some of these stuff, this LN POS device, we still do, and we still support it. So, yeah, some of the the microcontroller developments and some of the enclosure design for that is sort of how I initially became involved.

And then I was looking to leave my Fiat job at the same time as there was some funding available for LNBits as a as an organization. So I was invited to to join the company then, and it's, yeah, it's it's been good ever since. So sort of day to day,

I mean, what what sorts of things am I focusing on? I'm generally not that deep within the core LNbits project itself.

I'm usually working on things like the LNbits webshop, which we have. I've not plugged up. We've a webshop for buying stuff. If you wanna buy an LNbits box, get one there. So I'm I'm running that, and then I'm mostly doing hardware development.

So things like this LNbits box. We have remote signers, things like that. And for the most part, I'm I'm just working on my own on these projects, getting completed. What is really nice is interacting with the community, whether that's, you know, in the LNbits.

We have we have Telegram channel, or we also have this MakerBits group. And just talking to people about how they're using LNbits in real life because we really you don't know. We don't have any we don't have anything within LNbits to keeping track of, you know, how many people have this installed,

how many people are downloading it. I guess GitHub probably do, but we do not. Mhmm. And there's a lot of people running LNbits. It's not until, you know, you go to some random bar in Berlin. It's like, alright. But the hell you're using LNbits. It's it really is a widely used piece of software.

A question from doctors of Argo kind of loosely tied to what you're talking about there. What is he's asked, what is your most difficult challenge in acquiring new users?

I don't know. Probably awareness. I think something that as an open source project, we probably struggled with marketing. And even the company, it's not something we've really focused on. So a lot of people are not really aware even that LNBITS exists.

I think, from from my perspective and knowing you and LNBITS from, like, early, early days, I think also it's like it does so much. It's hard to it's like, what is LNbits?

And it's like, who's fucking that's a lot. It does loads of stuff. It's a lot harder to sell than, like, what is foundation or what is you know what I mean? Like, it's it's like that just does one thing, and I think that makes it more difficult to market

from my perspective. I could be wrong. Yeah. I think you're right. And that's why we sort of we moved extensions out into standalone and extensions can be enabled because one of the things we're looking at into the future is creating wizards that will configure LM bits for particular users, circumstances

that they're you know, there might be a merchant, so we went through the merchant wizard or, you know, what whatever the setup is just to make the onboarding more straightforward, make it more obvious what what people can do with LMbits.

Was that a dog I just heard shaking his ears? Oh, yeah. Did you hear the dog? Yeah. Yeah. That's the one. Yeah. Can you give it give it a stroke from me? Oh, it's too far away now. She's alright. Okay. Alright. We have another question from Observer.

Does Ellen bits have advantages over lightning.pub if the user's main focus is privacy and connectivity and just being an uncle Jim for family and friends? No merchant requirements or necessity for extensions.

I've never come across lightning.pub before. I'm looking at the website now. I don't know enough about lightning.pub to be able to answer that, really. Okay.

Do you know what that is, Max? I actually don't know what lightning.pub is either. I feel like I've heard it mentioned, but, I mean, everyone knows. I don't really use lightning very much, so, I'm not really the person to ask.

Yeah. Sorry. I'm out of the loop. Obviously not Yeah. Sorry, observer. Can't answer that one. Bring the dog back in. He might know. No. I've sat down now. Okay. Okay.

Did we talk about funding? Did we get that far? As in funding sources? Mhmm. Yeah. We did cover a little bit. I think, Max, do you mean, like, how Ellenbits the company, the organization is actually? Like Yeah. Sorry. I don't mean, like, funding channels or that kind of stuff. I mean, like, how do you

you're a small team that's open source, and I'm just wondering, like, how do you keep yourselves going,

especially with your baller lifestyle? Like, I know how you live. Mean, how how do they how do they pay for you? Well, I'm living at large. I've literally been drinking whiskey whilst we've been having this call, which makes it so much more. Considering it's Six hour. Yeah. Sat in the Bentley.

Yeah.

I mean, so the financials of the company, I probably can't go into too much, but, you know, we we have a few things. We've got the SaaS, and our focus at the moment is turning the SaaS into a product.

It's gonna be really widely used and makes LMBits entirely self sufficient, which we're not far away from. Whilst we're getting to that point, we do have some VC funding as well. And we, you know, we have the Allenbits web shop, which, you know, that generates a significant amount of revenue.

Then all these things come together to keep Allenbits running. We do also have paid extensions. So I think you probably will have seen this sort of thing with with WordPress where you can you can pay for an extension.

So we do have some extensions within LNbits that peep that users can purchase. Is that on a,

like, a one time basis, or is it, like, an annual fee? Or It it it differs. So you can you can pay to enable extensions, but also so you may have seen notes before when I was demoing the the point of sale extension. That has a an optional kickback to LMBits.

So I think it's half a percent, maybe less than that, of sales that are made through through that point of sale are going to LMBits. Okay. That's good. Nice. One a a big rabbit hole as you as you're well aware, Kofi, from our last physical meetup that I've been going down is AI vibe coding sort of thing. Oh, yeah. LNbits seems like it's

primed for vibe coders to, like, build cool extensions. What's your take on that? Have you seen anybody doing that? Like, what would that look like? Because it seems like it's, like, the perfect place to go and and play around. Oh, yeah.

It's one of the things on my notes actually I didn't cover. Massively, we have so many people in in Telegram at the moment. They're like, oh, this is the this is what I've had codes today. This is what I created yesterday.

And because LMbits is API first, and we have good LLM documents now that LLMs can can take on board to build things, it really is quick to to build applications with LLMs. I will I'll provide some links after this, actually, and you can maybe pop them into the show notes.

If I I'll screen share again.

So we have some documentation around how to use LN bits with LLMs. And we have this this LLM document that provides all the API information that is needed for an l LN just to create what whatever Lightning application you want to build.

So what does that look like? It's I go to Cloud. I I give it this link, and I say, go and read this, and then build me this. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. So this is all basic. The it's a markdown file, right, with links out to all these different things that LMbits can do and how it how it works. And we also what else do we have? We have

have an open open API spec. So we have this thing called redoc, which documents all of the API endpoints that LNbits has. As an example, you know, we can look at the the wallets. So, know, you can hit these API endpoints to generate invoices, pay invoices, check the status of in invoices, and we can get the

get the

the open open API spec here that you can also feed to an LM and just giving him more context about what's about how to interact with LNBiz.

Awesome. Well, give give us some quick examples. You don't need to name any names or or docs anymore. What have you seen come out of, like, this this five coding error in the in the Telegram chat? Oh, off the top of my head, can't remember. I'll I'll dig out some links, and I'll I'll pop them. You you put me on the spot. Sorry.

That's what I'm here for. That's what I'm paid to do. Well, yeah, do We'll put Q on the spot. What sort of things can you imagine yourself building? Oh, you put me on the spot now. Yeah. I I I I've had the kind of VLS validating Lightning signer, like Lightning with the keys

in a hardware module for quite time, and I know something coffee and I have spoken about. So that's the first one that jumps out to my to my mind. I

don't know whether I even with the assistance of Claude, I've got the technical chops to do something like that without losing funds, but I guess that's part of the journey. Right? So what Yeah. I think what would be in English?

It's basically allows you to to use Lightning, but with the keys for your Lightning node. Traditionally, they would need to be hot on on a server or on your phone or something. And the validating VLS, this this

kind of protocol or project, I guess, has been floating around for quite some time. And correct me if I'm wrong, Coffey, I've never seen it actually come into to fruition, but, like, the idea is that it's it's Lightning but with the keys in a more secure environment.

Yeah. I think some module within Core Lightning that people have been looking at, yeah, like I say, a number of years to pull it out into a piece of hardware or a standalone piece of software.

We're talking about this this week, not really in the sort of the the node level, maybe something that could be done with LMbits and the, you know, linking into what foundation are doing. You've got the the Passport Prime with your SDK, and I think we could probably do something interesting.

You know, it could probably LLM the whole thing up in having a a VLS for LN bits within the Passport Prime. I think it would be a neat application of it. Sounds like you and I need to go on a a little coffee date somewhere.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll do that. We'll do that. Hack this together. We'll get it out. Two days, and it'll be live production ready straight up. I'll I'll save up some tokens. Oh, yeah.

Alright. I'm gonna start wrapping this up because I do have a hard stop as per usual. Coffee, this has been been great. Great to get an update. The the like I say, the the UI and stuff is it's come on leaps and bounds since I last took any great detailed look at LMbits. So I'm

very happy to have you guys back on, and kudos for for the work that you and the team have been doing. It's it's looking wonderful. Looking forward to to meeting up for a little mini hackathon.

Sounds Sounds like we've we've got our project to work on now, so I'm looking forward to to that. And yeah. Max, Seth, thanks for joining us. Any final thoughts or coffee? Anything from you in terms of where to send people?

Check out elenbits.com. It has links to everything that's relevant that we've talked about today. Yeah. And thanks very much for having me on. It's been good to catch up with you all, and, yeah, we'll speak again soon, I doubt.

Yeah. Good. Likewise. Greg in the chat. It's looking really, really slick since last time I saw it, so congrats to the team. Thank you. Alright, everybody. Thanks for joining us for Freedom Tech Friday. We will be on a week off next week as Seth and I will be, well, traveling home Yes. From We'll we'll be traveling home from Vegas and

so there will be no stream next week and we'll be back the week after. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you in two weeks. Have a good weekend everyone.

Thank you for listening to Freedom Tech Friday. To everyone who boosted, asked questions, and participated in the show, we appreciate you all. Make sure to join us next week on Friday at 9AM EST and 2PM London.

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