Bitcoin hacktivist spirit is strong in Ben Arc

Bitcoin is close to becoming worthless.

Let's go!

Now, what's the Bitcoin? Bitcoin's like rat poison. Yeah. Oh. The greatest scam in history. Let's get it. Bitcoin will go to fucking zero.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, you ungovernable misfits. I'm your host, Max. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is useless, worthless, and doomed to fail. But what if everyone's wrong? What if it's the system that is doomed to fail?

Join me as I speak to some of the brightest people in the space and slither to the deepest, darkest depths of the Bitcoin rabbit hole.

Today's episode is with Ben Ark. He's an absolute legend. We get into some of the stuff he's been doing with Ellen Bitts and the other projects he's been working on. The man's prolific. He has been working on so many different things over the past couple of years, as well as putting out incredible content,

and we are very, very proud to be featuring him for 21ism this month. This was from an episode I recorded for 21ism, and if you haven't checked it out, I suggest you go and read through the amazing article that was written by self-banked, along with checking out the other categories at 21ism.com.

Before we dive in, I just want to say thank you to my new sponsor, Foundation Devices. I'm so fucking hyped out of these guys on board. Ever since taking this thing out of the box, it must have been two, three months ago, I got sent one hour just to test it, give it a bit of feedback.

I've been so impressed it's become my daily driver. I use this thing all the time. It's weighty, it feels nice, it's really slick to use, it's fully open source, it's got QR scanning, PSBT, it's got everything that you could want, and it's so simple.

Anyone who listens to this show knows I manage to fuck everything up, and I'm always on the phone to Q&A, just saying, "Look, mate, I've broken this today, "how do I fix it?" I'm probably the bane of his life, and every time he sees the phone ring, he just thinks, "Oh, fucking hell, I'm on this bloke again."

But he hasn't had to listen to me with this one, because it is honestly so simple. I've been suggesting it to all my friends and family, the ones that manage to Orange Bell anyway, and I don't feel concerned about setting it up with them and them making a mistake, because it really is so simple.

You can pair it with blue wallet, or any of your other favorite wallets, like Sparrow. If anyone's listening to this, and they're just, you know, I'm not sure. I haven't seen one. Then go across to foundation devices.com, and if you have any questions at all, you can reach out to the team, or you can reach out to me, just slide in my DMs,

I'm happy to answer any questions. And if you then decide you wanna buy one of these things, it's bit by bit in the promo code, and that will give you $10 off your purchase. And I promise you, you are not gonna regret it.

This thing is fucking amazing. Anyway, enough shilling. Enjoy the show. Hello, there we are, we're cooking on gas now. (laughs) There we are, always a technical issue with me. I think that's probably my side.

Sometimes these links just don't... No, no, no, it was me. I've got a little knob to turn the volume up, so I can actually hear you, and I didn't turn that up, so. Ah. (laughs) That's probably it.

There we are. How's the travels? I haven't actually started, yeah. I managed to put it all off. So I'm just gonna sort of shoot out the door. So I wanted to start a little bit earlier. Okay, no worries.

Because the kissing internets, you know, are gonna be intermittent, isn't it, inevitably? No matter how good it always works, when you're out and about, usually, as soon as you need to do anything meaningful, it's destined to break and not work.

(laughs) I have the same at my home, so I never know what's best, to be honest, but yeah, it's really good to talk to you. Yeah, I need to. Looking forward to this one, and it's just dawned on me.

It's our 12th block for 21 is of now, so. Wow. Yeah, so it's a big block for us. It's just gone so, so quickly. No, it's great. It's the size, so, and the people you've had on there, you know, I feel like I've got a bit of imposter syndrome, really, 'cause they're all brilliant.

(laughs) Well, I have been looking through your GitHub and all the things that you've been doing, and I think that you're being a bit hard in yourself there. You've got some incredible projects here, and just the sheer amount of stuff.

Exactly, they've started to accumulate now. (laughs) Which I quite like. Yeah. It's a problem in maintenance then, you know, if it was a responsible developer, it would create a project and then spend years maintaining it and improving it, whereas I have a tendency to prototype and make something and then just leave it

and run away and do something else. (laughs) Which isn't the best practice, really. (laughs) Is that the bit you enjoy, then, is to, like, the start of a project and really getting your teeth in and creating?

Is that the bit you've closed? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just, I get a sort of beam up on it, again, it just needs to be scratched. Think of something and I really want it to exist. And then if I, like, can't get someone else to convince someone else to try and make it, then sometimes you're just in a position where you're like,

okay, well, I might see myself now, and then you just sort of muscle through it and get it done. And then, and also I've got this, like, innate paranoia that I think when you're young, you have a lot of good ideas, which kind of come to you in a big flood.

And then, as you get older, those ideas come to you less and less. And, quite often, you use ideas you had that when you were younger. And I've always kind of got this, 'cause I'm getting, I'm no spring chicken, I'm getting this fear that I'm gonna start with the Wellston and start emptying, going dry.

I also think that if you, like, massage that part of your brain, which comes up with good ideas, and encourage it and nurture it, then obviously it's gonna work more. So I don't like, you know, if an idea has popped into my head, I don't like just kind of ignoring it, and then focusing on others, you know, stuff.

I like trying to work through it and make it, 'cause one day I'll just have wheels to run out of ideas, and then I can live off all the, there we are, then I can go back and maintain all the projects.

- Yeah, exactly. Well, you will have enough. You've got quite a lot of projects on the go here, and they're all bits that were really interesting to me, 'cause I first was like, I knew you were working with Ellen Bitts, and I was like, oh, you know, this is gonna be really interesting to learn some more on there.

And then I started looking through GitHub. It seems to me you are someone who particularly likes hardware, am I right? - I mean, I just started with the hardware stuff because, you know, you like, you see something, and you think, well, that can be done better, so I remember going to a lightning hack day,

and this is sort of at the same time where I had a little bit more time on my hands, 'cause I'd finished teaching, so I had some more, just some more access to more time. And I went to a lightning hack day in Berlin, and I think it was the first proper Bitcoin event I'd been to, and they're very, like, maker-centric,

and there was a sweet machine there with a QR code, and you'd scan the QR code, and it'd take you to a website, and then on the website, you would, like, pay an invoice, and then once you paid the invoice, you could get the sweets to come out of the machine.

I saw lots of people trying to use it by getting their wallets out and scanning the piece of paper, rather than scanning the piece of paper with a regular QR code scanner, and then going to go into a website.

So I thought, well, ideally, there would be a, and the other thing was, as well, actually, this sweet machine had, like, a full node on it, and I thought that seemed silly, too. I was like, you don't want full nodes and everything.

You want these to be kind of, like, secondary devices and then a primary device, as a node, so you'd have your sweet machines talking to it. So I started playing around with microcontrollers and, like, generating invoices on little screens for the sweet machine, and then just kind of, it's all sort of snowballed from there,

and really, as soon as you start making stuff it, you know, offshoots, doesn't it? And then you just follow the paths, and... - Well, you say, doesn't it? I have to say, I don't build, I break.

We're on sort of, our opposite ends of the spectrum here, right? I sort of test things, break them, then need help from everyone in the world, and eventually get things working, that's...

- Well, eventually get things working. That's the point, so, like, the little e-paper screen I used for my sweet machine, which was, like, a secondary device. I had a little microcontroller on it, and it could ask a node for an invoice, and then put the invoice on a little e-paper.

I think getting it to generate a QR code, 'cause I couldn't find any, at that time, I couldn't find any libraries, which were good enough to be able to generate, so I had to sort of try and write raw.

It probably took me, on and off, like, four months to get the QR code on a screen, 'cause I didn't know what I was doing, I wasn't, like, I'm not a developer, so I was having to kind of learn on the job.

And then just go to, I went to a couple of conferences, a couple of hack events, and I would just, like, progress a little bit more by picking people's brains, and then when you learn more skills, you just kind of, like, everything, yeah, more doors kind of open to you.

So, I mean, that's where the word hacking comes from, isn't it? It's from literally just hacking away a keyboard to make things to get in a bit of software, whatever, hardware, and hacking away, to get it to do something else, and eventually it does something else, and hopefully it'll do something else is useful, not a bug.

So, yeah, I think that's kind of the spirit of things, isn't it? You just think it away, break it, get it working, learn, improve, you know? - Yeah, it is fun. It's fun when it works, and also the process of going through it.

I think some people have more of that sort of engineering mindset and enjoy putting the puzzle pieces together and actually enjoy the ride of making something, breaking something, and fixing something more than others.

It seems that you do a lot of it. You said you're not a developer. What was it that brought you into this and were you already a technical person? - I was always kind of, yeah, I was always kind of interested in computers and things, and perhaps in another life, I would have done more computer-based,

I would have had a more computer-based background, but I'm glad that I didn't, because I had 15 years of a very rewarding teacher career, who's a designer technology teacher, and I taught a little bit of IT.

And then we hadn't, you know, I was quite pally with sort of, within design and technology, the subject, you have electronics, so I would quite often cover lessons for electronics teachers.

And we work, I work specifically with, you know, kids with like severe behavioral difficulties and special units, and something like electronics, where it's very kinesthetic, very physical and rewarding, and you feel like you've achieved something, you know, you get a real buzz.

That was a very useful tool for us to work with, you know, some of the kids we were working with, and yeah, you know, they sit still and solder something quite happily, and get some LEDs to turn on and on, whatever.

So I, you know, I had a very rudimentary understanding of electronics, and I'd done some computer stuff as well, like, you know, I could spin up a WordPress website, for example, or, you know, so pretty basic, you know, I'd like hacked into, maybe I'd packed into a plugin at some point, and got it to do something else in PHP.

But it's just time, like I didn't have time when I was teaching, and then I decided to take her, 'cause the unit where I was working, we had a lot of downward pressure from, 'cause it was during the austerity stuff, and the sort of provision which we were providing, so it was like one to one, two to one,

it's quite expensive for local governments, so we kind of get all those services, got the squeeze. And at that point, I was like, you know, we were in a position where I was able to take a little bit of time off, and then I just thought, well, I've got an opportunity now, and I don't know whether this is fleeting,

and whether it's gonna last for a long. I've always thought I'd be quite good at doing technical stuff and making things, so I'm just gonna give it a go, I'm just gonna see if I can, you know?

And also, you know, I always enjoyed kind of like coming up with ideas and stuff, so I thought I'd now got the opportunity where I'm not doing something, I don't have to do something every day, I can just do something original, I can do whatever I want, so.

And then, yeah, sat down and started trying to make stuff. And it did a snowball, so I made the sweet machine, and then I realized with that same, you know, microcontroller and e-paper screen, I could get a keypad, you know?

And then I could plug the keypad in, like a cheap, you know, 50P, a keypad membrane thing from Amazon, or AliExpress or something. I could plug that in, and I could input a number, press the hashtag, and then get it to generate the invoice.

So there you are, you have a point of sale then. And then I was like, I went through that kind of R&D thing, I was, you know, the e-paper screen as cool as e-paper is, and as much as, just as lovely as, you know, as a technology is, it's really bad in low light.

So, you know, we tried to use the point of sale in like a bar, and it just didn't work, so it was too dark. And for some reason, lightning wallets, they don't turn on the, you know, like your normal QR code scanner, if it's in the dark, your normal, you know, 3.2 star crappy QR code scanner off the Play Store,

if it's in the dark, it will turn on your torch and your phone, but for some reason, lightning wallets don't do that. So, I thought, okay, now I need like, something with a back light, and sort of experimented with solutions for that.

And eventually I came up with like a little TFT screen, using that, and then I found the M5 stack, which has a, so what was cool about the, you know, the DIY version was it's very cheap, so I got it down to about $8 for the point of sale to make it, and it's quite a nice workshop too.

But then I found this off the shelf solution by M5 stack, called the M5 stack facers kit, where you can have like a keypad and a screen, and it's all kind of built into a thing, into a little unit, and it even comes with a little dock.

You can just stick it on and it will charge, and the dock's magnetic, so it's absolutely perfect for a bar. So I managed to get it in room 77, and Christian, which will help me get it in room 77, where they're accepting payments.

And it was battle-tested, you know, like it had a lot of transactions go through it, and the thing worked well, so that's the M5 stack Sats project, which was on my video as well. And then there were a bunch of, you know, some more problems, so it's like that worked well, but then the only York said it's working so well,

like it needs to get all these transactions into his node, and he doesn't know where they're from, what they're for, so he needs the ability to have, like, you know, to download a CSV file, just to get paid, you know, pay his taxes, so he needed the ability to do that.

Also, I had, you know, when I was developing the M5 stack Sats, I had to make, like, five different versions, like one for LND, one for, you know, lightning dig, one for open node, one for LMP, one for, yeah, and someone made one for the BTPACE everything, and I was thinking this is crazy, like,

why can't I have a piece of middleware software which connects to all these funding sources, and then I just connect to the middleware software, and it doesn't matter what funding source is underneath it.

So that's kind of like one of the ideas for, so there was, like, the ability to have, you know, download a CSV and the ability to, yeah, the ability to be able to have some sort of middleware connecting to a funding source.

And then, the other thing I thought was, you know, instead of a keypad, I can plug in a coin acceptor, so I plug in a coin acceptor to my little microcontroller and I put coins in, and then it sends pulses to the microcontroller, and then I can generate them.

At that point, L and URL withdraw, which is like a faucet thing that had been developed, so I could generate an L and URL withdraw, somebody could scallop, and they could get the funds, but in order to make an ATM like that, the ATM needs, like, admin access to your wallet, it needs to be able to take all the, you know,

spend from your wallet, essentially. So I want a limited amount of money in my wallet, but as it was at that point, you know, L and D, I suppose you had L and D hub, actually, with L and D, by I go, and blue wallet stops, okay, that's the exception, but open node lightning D, L and pay, a bunch of other wallets,

they didn't have the abilities to have accounts, like multiple accounts, and I was like, "Well, I just want a wallet with, like, 50 quid in, "and I can just top it up." So that was the other idea for L and Bits, was to have multiple accounts, too, so that L and Bits kind of came, it's all, I mean, it's not, you know, divine inspiration,

a genius, you know, whatever, like, comes up with a great idea, it's trying to make something, and then just finding all these stumbling blocks and hurdles, and then trying to find a solution for the stumbling blocks and hurdles, and that all just happened to be wrapped up in a nice piece of software, basically.

The other thing was the extensions in L and Bits, so I don't know if it sort of hopped from hardware to L and Bits here quite quickly, but we can go back to hardware in a minute. - Yeah, look, do you mind just doing a bit of an overview for L and Bits for anyone who's listening, and actually, I've been deep, please,

without working quite helpful? - So it's basically does all that stuff, like you can quickly spin up an L and Bits, I connect it to a funding source, and then you can generate, like, multiple wallets through a GUI, each wallet has end users as well, actually.

Each wallet has its own API keys, so I can have a wallet just for my ATM, and it's only got access to the amount of funds it's got access to in that wallet, basically. And this is middleware, so it sits on top of your funding source.

The other thing was, like I said, WordPress, I played around with WordPress in the past, although it's obviously a terrible code, people hate the code base. What's genius about it is the plug-in system, so you have a very simple blog, and then you develop it in any direction you want to develop it in.

You want to make a shop, you download from commerce, you want to make a forum, you download some, you know, community thing, street videos, you want to download some other plug-in, and there's niche plug-ins, there's more complex plug-ins, and in fact, very fitting today.

One of the first pieces of software I made on Lightning Network was something called the Sinclair Faucet. This was a couple of years ago. This was when L and URL withdrawal was, first kind of came about.

So the ability to your phone to do, like, get in post requests, sorry, your wallet, your Lightning Wallet on your phone to do a get in post request, which means that, you know, you don't have to just scan an invoice.

You can scan essentially a URL, and then your wallet will go to that URL, and that URL might give an invoice, or it might say generate, you know, to your wallet, now generating invoice for, I don't know, hundreds of Sats, your wallet can do that, give them the invoice, and they'll pay it.

For the user, it's just to get, you know, you get a static QR code, you can scan it, and then boom, you can have funds pop into your wallet, or you can scan it and say, yes, I want to pay X amount, and then pay the static QR code.

Anyway, so L and URL withdrawal was a thing, they really liked the concept, and I've been thinking about this concept for such a long time, so it existed, that was great. So I made a faucet called the Sinclair Faucet, which is fitting because today's a day in fact, where Clive Sinclair, who was based in honor of,

he died today, so there we are. So the Sinclair Faucet allowed you to put in an amount, put in, like, how many intervals you wanted, and how much time between each interval, and then you paid an invoice, and then it generated QR code, and every X amount of time that QR code would spare some Sats for somebody to get like a faucet.

And that was like a fun thing, because you could just put up QR code on Twitter, and people could like start, you know, sucking Sats from it, obviously sooner or later, people made like bots to do it, whatever, but for a short period, it was a lot of fun.

And I had to do like a lot of work connecting that to a funding source, doing all these things, to be able to build Sinclair Faucet on top of it. And I thought this is silly, like, I want something where I can just take the functions, the Sinclair Faucet functions, not that all the base stuff of it connecting

to a funding source, getting an invoice paying, an invoice, whatever. I just want, I want like a piece of software where I can just build extensions for it, so I can sit down, have a goofy idea, build an extension for that piece of software, and then it will do all the other lightning stuff underneath it for me.

And that's kind of the concept behind Ellen Bitts as well, is it's got this extension framework, which is a lot like WordPress in that you can extend it out in 20 direction you want. Some of them are very niche extensions, some of them are quite generalised extensions, which allow you to do things.

So for example, you know, you have a node running, and you're waiting for offers to finally make it, you know, rest these offers to finally make it on a protocol level, but you don't want to wait for that, so you want to just be able to pay static QR codes.

Well, all lightning wallets pretty much support some of the Cordellin URL pay, which is the ability to have a static QR code which you scan. And then it says, give me an invoice, sorry, it says, it gives you an invoice, and then you pay the invoice, essentially.

Well, in Ellen Bitts, you can do that with an extension. There's an extension called Ellen URL pay, and you can go in, you can generate in Ellen URL pay. And it takes care of all the, you know, the request stuff between your, so when your phone connects to it, it'll take care of all the requests and request stuff for you.

And you can connect it to any funding source. So now on Ellen D, on C Lightning, on whatever, you've got the ability to do Ellen URL pays. The other thing is like, well, there's loads of extensions.

I mean, I think one of the coolest extensions, one of the first ones you made was just a simple point of sale, like a shareable point of sale. And it looks like a point of sale, looks really nice on a phone.

You can open it in a phone and it's just, you know, it's phone ready and you've just got a keypad, you press the keypad and then it generates an invoice, someone can pay it. It's denominated in fiat, so you can give it to the person working in your cafe or bar.

They don't need to know anything about Bitcoin. They just have someone coming in and say, I want to buy a beer. They say, okay, you want to pay Bitcoin? Okay, I got this, you know, we've got this thing, this link we can open and you can pay in Bitcoin.

And then it goes to the bar owner's wallet. What's cool about it is it's shareable. So if you press the star button, you get a little QR code, and then everybody in the bar can scan that QR code with a normal QR code scanner, open up that URL, and now they've got that same point of sale on their phone.

So, and it has no connection with, like you can't get any information, so it has no read keys, it has no nothing. All you can literally do is generate an invoice from an unknown wallet, you know.

So for your bar staff, it's great. So in Guatemala, IBEX, which is a bank, they do banking solutions. They've got a service now for our Salvadorians who have to accept Bitcoin, but they'd rather have the fear 'cause it's stable.

They can, where they just literally give them, they didn't give them an L&Bits wallet or anything, they've got our L&Bits server installed, and they just give them one of these point of sales.

And then the service, like the hairdressers or the shop, they use that point of sale to accept Bitcoin, and then every couple of days they turn to IBEX and they say, "Oh, can we have the cash?"

And IBEX just gives them the cash. And then they take a small percentage for the service. So that's cool. I mean, there's a whole business model there aren't just off based off one tiny little extension.

And then all the backend stuff is taking care of the L&Bits server is taking care of the funding source and all that, which is, again, cool. Like if this is another issue in the bar is, you're getting a lot of payments coming in and suddenly your channels go off WAC and for a short period, you want to switch to a custodial

solution like L&P, L&P is wonderful or open node where you'll need to switch to a custodial solution while you fix your node and balance your channels and whatever else you need to do. And you can do that with L&Bits.

You can literally just, you know, change a variable and now it's using a different funding source. But for the end user, you know, for the person in the bar, it has no effect. They can still just generate an invoice, pay an invoice, you know, check to see if the invoice is being paid.

So, yeah, so the ability to have easily split up lots of different wallets. The ability to have, you know, bank, be able to download a CSV, avoid transactions, that sort of stuff. The ability to have extensions as well.

And also the last thing was the Insta Wallet. So it's quite nice. It's all in browser and it's kind of more of a thing now, like this coin OS, which does this as well. But at the time, this was quite a breakthrough.

Not many people have seen it. Like the web browser can access your phone, camera and can scan a QR code. So you can just use the whole wallet system in your phone browser. So you don't need to download any software.

So that's useful for like meetups, for conferences, where you want to go, whatever you want to go with demos. You want to give people a lightning experience, a Bitcoin experience, but you don't want them to have to like download a piece of stuff, like convince them to download a piece of software.

Even though it's a legitimate piece of software for your app store, people are just a bit reluctant for some reason. They're less reluctant to go to some dodgy URL. And then they can instantly, you know, you can give them Sats.

And then they can instantly go and pay for, you know, buy some sweet, sweet machine, you know, put top up their wallet on the ATM. And they can, you know, can start having experiences with the Insta Wallet too.

So it does loads of stuff, it's flipping brilliant. But now I'm doing less hardware, 'cause obviously the Allen bits is the ability to make, to make extensions, 'cause it doesn't take long.

It's very appealing and it is quite distracting. And the last extension I did was I just got an LN URL pay and an LN URL withdrawn stuck them together. So you could create an LN URL pay, so a static URL code where you can pay and you can set a limit.

So, you know, between 10 and 10,000 satoshis, say. And then if you pay, because the way LN URL works, you get a receipt in your wallet, which has like, you can put text and you can specify text or URL.

So it gives you back a URL. You click on that URL and then it opens up a page and you might win, you know, twice your money. So it's a gambling in a QR code. - Ah, okay. - Yeah, that's, that's, that's dice.

Yeah, it's a bit naughty, but it's, I like the concept. So if you imagine like a tube station, yeah, and you just put up a QR code for like a 10,000 sat, you know, bet, you know, and you know, people, if they've got the money and they're stood at the tube station, they could scan it, they could make a little gamble,

they might get the money. I hate gambling, by the way. But again, it's one of those examples of, I had an idea for something, it was such an itch. I needed to scratch it, I needed to exist.

So I made this thing. I've disabled it by default. That's, you know, so you have to go and enable it in the backend to get it up on your, your L and bit server. Which, so yeah, there's a lot of extensions, there's all sorts of funky things.

More recently, I realized that as obviously, for some reason, I've got an interesting point of sales, I realized that you can have an offline point of sale using L and URL pay. So I've made a point of sale.

One of the great things about L and URL as well is you get a smaller QR code. It doesn't have to be one of those crazy lightning invoices. I can use a smaller bit of cheaper bit of hardware.

Nice little screen on it. Again, to keep how do you input the number in fear? You press hashtag and then it generates an L and URL pay. Now, what it does is it has a secret inside the point of sale, okay?

The person who owns the point of sale, you know, the merchant, the shop owner, whatever, he goes to L and bits. There's an L and URL point of sale extension. They go there, they create a new point of sale.

It gives them a secret. They give that secret to the physical point of sale, right? Now, when it generates L and R code for the customer to pay, it passes an encrypted copy of that pin of that, sorry, sorry, it uses that secret to encrypt a pin, a random pin, and then passes it to the customer.

The customer, customer's wallet, connects to the L and bits server, yeah, asks for an invoice to pay. Once the invoice is being paid, yeah, the L and bits server sends back to the customer and decrypted version of that pin.

So now the customer has a decrypted, so now they've got a pin three, seven, six, four, whatever. And then the merchants with the point of sale, they press the hash on the point of sale and it shows them the exact same pin.

And what that means is that the point of sale doesn't need to be online, which is that useful, Sophie? - Yeah, well, especially with some of the places that Bitcoin is going to be going, you know?

- Well, I mean, just not even that. I mean, how many times have you been in a bar and they've gone, oh, the point of sale's not working? - Oh, yeah, yeah. - I mean, you're like, basically like those point of sales, obviously, we've used it with cards, but more and more people are using point of sales with their phones.

So one of the devices needs to be online, doesn't it? Either the point of sale or the person, the customer, well, as the customers are online and there's generally Bitcoin customers are online, it makes sense that you can have an offline point of sale.

And like say, it's great for the outside. And this is, what's cool about this is you can use it in like a busy supermarket 'cause another extension we have in Alan bits is offline shop, which is a very similar concept.

In fact, it's kind of where I got the idea from. It's a very similar concept except the customer gets a word and then the merchant has a list, a word list, like draft, hippo, plant, whatever.

And say the customer then, when they pay, they get the word draft, they say that to the merchant and the merchant says, oh, yeah, okay, that's the next in my list. The next person who comes along, you know, they pay and they say, oh, plant.

And then the merchant says, yep, that's the next in my. So for a small merchant selling cans of Coke or whatever, as long as they've got that word list for like 20 words on, it'd be pretty hard and pointless for the customers to pack that system.

Like, so it's a way for them to have an offline shop, just a printed QR code which people can scan pay and then they just get a word back. So this is a very similar concept except with that concept, obviously the merchant needs that word list and it doesn't really scale very well.

Whereas with the physical point of sale, because you're just generating a pin, like no one needs to remember any word lists or anything. So you could use it in like a busy supermarket. And what's cool about it is you feel the speed, 'cause obviously a normal point of sale has to do a request, get an invoice

or do a request and connect to a bank, you know, the traditional legacy point of sale. And there is lag in the experience. Whereas with this thing, you put in a number, you press the thing, boom, there's a QR code.

You know, like it's like, instant, it's amazing. So yeah, that's the thing, but that also, so there's an example of me building extension for a very specific need, which is what's great about Alan Bitts.

And I'll put the PR, the extension on the Alan Bitts repo. Hopefully enough people will say, yeah, we want this in the core package. But if they don't, then it's just, you know, an extension I could use, an extension, a business running that particular service could use.

So yeah, you can have like niche proprietary even extensions which you build and you don't share with everybody. Or you can have more generalized extensions which people will use, it's great, it's great.

It's really clever. So it's very just modular in terms of you just choose what you want and everything. Is it kind of like bucketed off so that like you say, if someone doesn't like the idea of one, they don't use that, they just take the best they want them.

- Yeah, it's got, so currently, and it's this great 'cause this is like a scale problem. The extensions are their own self contained little folders where the database and everything is generated, you know, within the folder.

And it has each extension has its own API, it's own little front end pages in its own little folder. So you can literally just delete the folders you don't want or you can disable from, you know, your setup file, your config file, or you can, well, yeah, or you have to enable the extension anyway

within your island bit server when you're as a user. So you just pick the extensions you want. Now we sort of hit the point where we've got like 20 odd extensions and it's kind of disorientating to, it's kind of disorientating to, when you see all those extensions.

So we're at the point now where we need kind of a WordPress experience, where we need like, you know, you search for a plugin, it has recommended plugins or supported plugins. And then, yeah, it has recommended plugins or supported plugins, but yeah, so that's something we need to kind of figure out,

but we, you know, we built and then bits with that in mind that that hopefully will be a problem which we've got, and we've got that now, so. But it is still beta, let me put a caveat in there.

It is still beta. And there are some bugs as well. So there's three frameworks we use. Quasar and Vue, that's kind of like for the front end stuff to make it look pretty. And then the API is delivered using Quatt, which is, I'll go into it 'cause there might be some people listening who are interested.

It's like an asynchronous version of Flask, which is a very nice vanilla Python way to build an API. 'Cause Quatt isn't as battle-tested as we thought it was for some more complex functionality.

So for example, when you generate an invoice, say in an extension, like offline shop, you generate an invoice and offline shop. It has a little tag which says it's an offline shop, and then you have, it creates a listener, and that listener just waits to see if that invoice is being paid, yeah.

And then when it's being paid, it does some stuff, you know, like it does stuff, it updates the balance blah, blah, blah. Well, the way Quatt works is if you have lots of these listeners all waiting and listening, it kind of gets clogged up.

And that's okay 'cause, you know, what should then happen is you would have like error handling. So, you know, if there's an error, it will then just restart this little sort of nursery of listeners, but currently it just kills the Quatt and then you have to restart.

So that's something you get if you're running like a really busy server, it starts to happen on your Allen bit server. And it requires like a one, two seconds restart. What we're doing is we're moving, I mean, this is, they're all problems which have solutions.

So we're moving away from Quatt, which is a shame 'cause we did like it. And I think, you know, it's kind of oversold 'cause this limitation isn't really talked about. But anyway, there's a very good similar Python API framework called fast API.

So we're currently in the process of switching away from Quatt to fast API. Hopefully that's which we've got core running and we've got that offline shop extension working actually 'cause it's one of the more complicated ones.

So now it's the case of us going through and switching over all the other extensions. Thankfully we're still at a point where there's like 20 extensions, so it's kind of a lot of work, but there's not like, it's not like WordPress where you'd have to like suddenly change, everyone would have to change their extensions.

That's why we're beta, I suppose, isn't it? So hopefully that will be the last, the bug which kind of gets us out of beta when we, and this will fix it. 'Cause fast API is far more battle tested.

What's also great about fast API is the Raspberry Blitz. They're making a GUI. So you know, a bit like the Umbral experience. In fact, I think they wanted to use the Umbral GUI but there's some fast issues around also, I don't know.

But yes, they're making a GUI. They're also using fast API. And I have heard that Spectre are doing some sort of web thing where they're gonna use fast API too. So as a design decision for us to choose fast API, we've now, basically we're gonna have a bunch of projects or using the same framework, which means we can pull talent together.

So the lead dev helping us convert from Quad to fast API now is a guy called Fusion 44, highly underfollowed on Twitter, so please follow him. Yeah, so he's helping us convert over from Quad to fast API.

He's also working on the Raspberry Blitz. So already we're like sharing talent, which is great. It kind of brings projects together. - That's cool. - Yeah, it's super cool. So this is, that's really exciting.

I, we also have, you know, there's a version you can plot, try of Lumbits, call Lumbits.com. Because it's not a company, it's nothing, you know, it's not like a professional outfit. It's literally just me and a, you know, a couple of other people running this on the server with our own node on there.

We, we, we don't provide a stable service. So, you know, if we've got some like new, weird thing we wanna do with funding sources, like we'll experiment directly on Lumbits.com, specifically because we don't, we don't, there's people start to put a lot of money on there.

And we were like, if we go there, we, you know, we wanna make a business, we wanna tackle the regulatory mode, we wanna, you know, like we wanna do it properly. Like we don't wanna just spin this thing up and then let people use it as a stable service, except it can be very risky.

- So it's a playground. If you wanna experiment with the software, go to Lumbits.com. If it's not working, then it shows you right, run it yourself. But yeah, you're warm, welcome to go on then just play with it, but please don't leave any funds on there because yeah, it's always, it's like the, the custodial

dilemma, which is people leave funds on your thing. And then you're like, okay, am I custodian forever now? Do I have to look after these funds for this person in case they randomly might turn up?

So hopefully at some point in Lumbits, the Lumbits server and a bit software, we will have like a burned down option in the variables, which will like, if funds become static for like a couple of weeks or something, maybe we'll start eating away at them, you know, like a percent every couple of days or something.

And that'll be cool for people running Lumbits servers, like perhaps as a, you know, a revenue stream, people forgetting their money, which they've left on the servers. And there's a bunch of other things we wanna do to call as well, to kind of bringing revenue streams for people running Lumbits servers.

But yeah, so by all means, go on Lumbits.com experiment, but you know, it's not a stable service and don't leave money on there, please. (laughing) I'll take it one day, I'll just run off, I'll give up on everything, I'll just quit everything.

(laughing) - Don't be reckless people. - But yeah, so when this does happen and when it's available on Raspberry Blitz and on Spectre, you were saying, what, like can you talk about-- - No, it's not, it's not, it's not, it's not that they're, sorry, they're making separate pieces of software which use fast API as well.

- Scary, okay. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But currently, Raspberry Blitz is a one-click install on, sorry, Lumbits is a one-click install on the Raspberry Blitz. So you can literally just click a button, same with Umbral, and that's super useful.

There's sort of like teething errors, teething issues, you know, like, I think with Umbral, it runs like an older version, whereas currently, I mean, that's probably on our side actually, 'cause we're a bit reckless with versioning, we just kind of say, oh, we're in the latest master to people, sorry, not master primary.

We shouldn't, we do really need to stop, you know, making putting tags in for, you know, versioning. So anyway, so Umbral sometimes has an older version, Raspberry Blitz pulls the latest version.

- So if I went on my Raspberry Blitz now, I could then have LN bits running, and it would be running on my Blitz. - Yeah, connected to your node. - Yeah. - Connected to my node. - And Raspberry Blitz also gives you a Tor address, so you can actually just like, share that Tor address out and people can start,

if you want to, people can start using it as a service. We do, so in the, this is the other thing, like in some of those one-click install, solutions, so I don't know if you remember WordPress, but years ago, you used to have like a sort of text file config form, you'd have to fill out,

and then eventually when I turned into like a GUI, you know, like a form on a web page, you could fill out. Well, we need to do the same thing, that's one of the things which I like this needs is like, a lot of variables and a lot of tweaking to the server is done through a config file.

But we, ideally this will, because obviously you have these one-click install options, it'd look like a lot easier for people if there was like a GUI, like an admin extension, where you could change variables.

So if you create a user in your LMS install, you can take the user ID, and then you can put it in the variable, the config, and you can be limited, so only you can use it. If you don't do that, then you might find that people start using you as a custodian.

They can't take your funds, all they can do is deposit funds, deposit funds, and then the funds are there, and then they can just burn down the funds, which are in that wallet. They won't let this one let you take anymore.

So yeah, so that's something which, for those solutions, we kind of need next. Basically, it's time, we only have a limited amount of time. Hopefully at some point, we've kind of explored with LMS.com for it to kind of get some sort of revenue stream, maybe some VC or something, or I don't know, make it like a legit service,

and then that would then fund development on all that stuff, 'cause they're worth quite time consuming tasks, and the more fun thing is just to come up with some goofy extension rather than work on that core stuff.

We did actually, silly for not for mentioning this earlier on, we did get a grant from the Human Rights Foundation for Ellen Bitts. - Awesome, very nice. - So we got 25 million SATs, and that's paying.

So there's a contributor to Ellen Bitts. Sorry, Ellen Bitts. There's a contributor to Ellen Bitts, Tal, and he actually came up with the Point of Sale extension, and he's constantly, you know, he's always been a contributor, he's always been helpful.

And he's gonna, so now that pays for him for a good few months to work on some of that boring stuff, like the admin extension and some boring stuff on, but it's less fun than random goofy extensions, and the admin extension and also, you know, doing like housekeeping, so keeping around the repo,

tackling issues, people may have support as well on like the Telegram group. We've got, in fact, we've got loads of great some people's offering support on the Telegram group, and we have a tip jar as well that might attend, we tend to do as a few of us who sort of like distribute the tips around all the people

who will like help out in the Telegram group, and we find that's really nice for people to be able to get a little bit of some SATs as well. So yeah, so we've got the Human Rights Foundation grant, that was great, that'll pay for Tal for a few months, to keep it chugging away, you know,

one of us, the rest of us have got RL, busy RL stuff to do. But hopefully, we'll get some other sustainable development scenario, IE bits.com being a stable service, but that involves, you know, time consuming things, like meetings and all that stuff.

So yeah, I don't know how long it'll be until that happens, or maybe lnbits.com, maybe we create it revenue streams, so it'll actually fund itself in some way, I don't know. We gotta kind of wait and see, we gotta wait and see.

- Sometimes it's one of those things where you come up with the idea, it's either good or it isn't. And then after a while, you get to a point where you're like, okay, now we need to fund this.

And it's kind of, you have to know that the idea works first, and it sounds like that's definitely working. - This is it, I mean, yeah, exactly, yeah. So it's not like a lot of people will think, okay, how do I come up with an idea which one they go get funding for, whereas us, we're like, we're looking at me going off, I'm sorry.

You know, like, 'cause there are some VCs, you can swear. - There are some VCs interested in it, there are some people who are interested in it, and we're like, oh, I said, we now have to tackle this thing that we have to.

So that's a nice position to be in. I don't know if it's the right thing to do with it. I don't know, like, because what we don't want personally, like we're free spirits, you know, like me, Fiat Jeff, we're probably the people who have been working on it.

He works on it part-time, he's got a full-time job too. He's a worker, he works on it, you know, spare time, he's got a full-time job as well. - Yep, we're sort of limited on time, and the time we do have, like, we're quite free spirited, and we just wanna work on what we wanna work on.

- So we tie it down. - Yeah, so I actually had a meeting with a VC, and they asked, like, you know, will you be able to work on it in a bit's full-time? And I was like, well, I think it needs less of me, and like more of like a business manager or whatever else.

Anyway, so yeah, that's something which will hopefully exist in the future, and we'll figure out some way in which we can do that, and we can still have time to be like, do the, 'cause it's like a research and development tool, it's like a experimentation tool, you know, so it's always kind of on the elements,

like, it's easy to be on the cutting edge, you know, like, I'm using it for my point of sale thing, I made that gambling thing with the offline shop thing, like, we can do like really experimental research on there.

Maybe, that's the way for it to go, maybe like some research council can offer a grant, and then we can formalize that as a way of sustaining development, I don't know. But we'll see, I mean, we do have a lot of great contributors as well.

- Hey Ben, can you hear me? - Yeah, I can hear you, man, what happened? Was it like a feedback thing, was it? - Yeah, it just literally went rrrrrr, and then just cut off. (laughs) - I don't know what happened.

- And then there are the alphabet people. - There are after-afterists, it's a CIA. - Well, that's what I did wonder, I thought, maybe Ellen Bits is just gonna be too successful, they thought, fuck, let's get rid of this bloke.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, cut them off, man. - I was on a, I was on a, I so, it's so good for the ego, isn't it, having like an hour where you can just talk about yourself, you know. - Well, it depends, it depends if you've actually got good stuff to talk about.

For you, I assume it's very good. For me, it's just an hour of me waffling about what I've broken that week, so. - No, 21ism is great, it's such a nice platform, and it looks fantastic as well.

So, South Bank does involve in this, he's one of my favorite big pointers. He's one of my favorite Bitcoiners as well, he's an incredible bloke. - Yeah, he's cool, he's super cool. Yeah, I haven't seen him for a while actually, 'cause he used to come to the, I don't wanna duck to the guy, so I better stop talking.

(laughing) - Yeah, you've always got to be careful, haven't you? But yeah, I mean, he's still about, I've had the pleasure of catching up with him a few times recently, and yeah, he's fantastic, and it's great to know to work with him as much as I do.

- I think he's going to the Bitcoin Wells, he's spoken about this publicly, so I can talk about it. There's a Bitcoin Wells meetup, isn't there at the end of the month? Oh, wait, there's something.

- Oh, right, okay. - Sorry for that noise. - That's all right. - Yeah, that's, when is it, end of this month, where about some Wells? - It's in Cardiff, it's actually, I think it's one of the bigger meetups, the Bitcoin Wells meetup.

We got, they set up a Bitcoin, not Bitcoin cash, the other one. Bitcoin, SV, whatever that is. They set up a meal for that, because because I think because Cardiff, it's amazing actually how small the meetups are in the UK, even in London, I always find them really quite small.

Whereas in Cardiff, we get like a decent amount of people, like 40 people, you know. - Oh, really? - Quite average, yeah. Sometimes more, we've had like 100, and because of that, we then got targeted, you know, 'cause these BSV people, they're like, okay, this is where the Bitcoin meetups were happening.

So we actually had some BSV meetups there, and I went to one of them, and it was amazing, 'cause it was full of Craig Wright's lawyers were all there. And there was actually a point in the meeting where Craig Wright's patent lawyer said she wasn't, she didn't know who she was, it could be a hero, she.

And I was like, dude, you worked for Craig Wright. (laughing) - The level of incompetence is stunning. - Why have you just said this to me? I know it's funny, 'cause of my mate, 'cause I went there, and I was like, let's just keep them in check.

And we did, you know, they had like a presentation, and then they had block size, like infographic. And in it, they had like a one megabyte block for Bitcoin. And then while the guy was talking, he like corrected himself and said, now actually, 'cause it's so quick, you know, it's more like blah, blah, blah.

And corrected himself. So I actually think it's important that people don't just shun these things, that they go to them and keep them in check. And then a lot of the people who were there might be noobs, and they just wander in, and like, if you can say to them in a non preachy way, oh yeah, do you know, this is a thing of Bitcoin,

and actually the real Bitcoin is this thing over here. I think that's quite a good thing to do. Anyway, the guy I was with is another Bitcoiner from Cardiff. At one point, he stood up, 'cause it was just a room full of people in suits, basically people who were being employed, they're under, you know, in contract.

And the guy, the Bitcoiner was really stood up at one point, he went, "You lot, you lot should come to our Bitcoin meetup, "or you lot are being paid to be here, "and I meet up, no one's being paid."

I was like, "Oh my, it's so embarrassing." I was like, "Dish, sit down, sit down." (laughs) - Yeah, but you don't know. - He might just save someone's skin, because, you know, the thing is I've listened to a few, like conversations with these BSVers, you know, any other shit coin, really.

And obviously, when you're paying for marketing, and you're paying to work out how to get into someone's head and make them think this is the best thing ever, if someone's not that technical, and they don't really know what they're listening to, it's very easy for someone to be scammed like that.

And like a lot of these people, you know, they're very convincing con artists. You know, that is their job is to lie to people and make it convincing. And people do get wrapped up. And it is sad to see.

It's just, I kind of find, I think, well, how much time do we all have to spend, like trying to explain to them and trying to help? Like, I kind of think a lot of the time, I just don't bother anymore, 'cause I just think like-- - Oh yeah, I mean, there is also a very good, and actually, I think it's correct argument

if you give them too much attention, and it propagates. But what I'm saying is that if you have, it's a laugh, you know, I wanna go to like an Ethereum conference as well for the exact same reason.

(laughing) 'Cause it's just fun, like just to go-- - Which is worse. - Which is worse. - Just to go, I think, oh, it's gonna be BSV, Krikey. It looks like, well, if Ethereum's full of scammers, there's a lot of scammers, but there's also some very talented front-end dev types.

That's why all the Ethereum stuff looks so good. It looks great. Who wanted too much of Bitcoin, and they're like, Ethereum's built for impatient people. When Bitcoin was made, and before pre-Bitcoin, that was his promise of a digital, digitally native currency, which would have micro payments, blah, blah, blah.

And so she's scalable, smart contracts, blah, blah. And all that stuff is possible on Bitcoin, it's just, it requires time to build it. Whereas people are impatient, and they're like, no, we want those things now.

But by being impatient, it's like any building project. By being impatient, and then just trying to jump over hurdles to get to the next thing, without dealing with whatever the first thing first.

You end up building houses on sand, you know, like... And that's what Ethereum community do. They have these great ideas for all sorts of like DAOs and all these cool stuff. And the houses built on sand, and ultimately, all that stuff will be on Bitcoin.

And I think people realize that more and more now that Bitcoin's the safe, super reserved, conservative piece of software, and then over time, like all that stuff will come to Bitcoin. But it's just, you've just got to be patient.

So Ethereum's for impatient people. We still got some talent in there. It's come around a time where people are particularly impatient. Like if you look at the rest of the world and how things are built, it is this move fast, break things, like no one can wait for anything.

Everyone wants results now, now, now. And, you know, Bitcoin is so polar to that. It's so different. And I think a lot of people in tech, especially like they're used to everything just happening so quickly.

And so they probably do look at Bitcoin. If you don't understand the fundamentals, if you don't understand quite how important this, you know, the foundations have to be absolutely rock-solid and you cannot afford to make any mistakes.

They probably do look at it and just go, "Oh, it's fucking boring, isn't it?" And then you see, well, it is. And then you see this shiny thing in Ethereum and people dancing around like fucking unicorns or something.

You're like, "Wow, look at this." You know, and they get dragged over there. So, yeah, like, they'll come. - Yeah, I mean, I have seen on Lightning, I've seen, and I've tweeted this out, I think, and I've said a few things about this public, but like, I have seen developers coming back from that world.

So like the developers who wanted for their project, they needed the utility of micro-payments. So they moved away from Bitcoin, or they needed like, you know, in things to be settled quicker.

So they moved away from Bitcoin. And now I'm seeing them coming back as obviously Lightning Network offers that utility for their projects. So I'm seeing more and more projects coming back to Bitcoin and then moving away, you know, ditching their blockchains or whatever, and using Lightning Network.

So that's very encouraging. And I think actually Lightning Network, it's very attractive to front-end devs. 'Cause, you know, when you do make Bitcoin things, it's really scary. Like one of my hardware projects is the Bowser wallet, and it's like a hardware wallet, which has like a Tetris game on it.

So it looks like a little Tetris game, basically. But if you press like a button and put in a pin, you can open up a hardware wallet. And it's made for very limited funds, but say if you're having to cross a border, like you're searing refugee and you take some funds with you or whatever, and you want to wait and take it with you

where, you know, you're not going to get, so we're not going to take it off you. But making that is that scary because people put sort of significant funds on there and the crypto is pretty complicated.

And there's lots of different like address formats and you have to cater for all these different sort of technologies which have been built up over the years. And then also you're all the low hanging fruit has kind of already been pinched.

So where is with Lightning Network, it's less scary. Like you just got a funding source and you're just generating invoices, paying invoices and checking if they've been paid essentially.

And then you can build stuff on top of it. And that's what I get to more protocol the type bit, you're building applications on top of it. And you can, you don't have to just because of the transaction sizes, you can be on chain, sorry, main, main, and you can pay out tens of Tashis, a couple of Tashis for experiments.

Like I've never used Tesla in any of my developing. And you can on Lightning because it's fine. So I need a few Tashis here and there. I mean, obviously I'll ask that question again in the future and I'm sure I can stop it.

(laughing) But yeah, so I think it's much more attractive to developers and it's much easier to access. And also I don't think there's this, some people in the Bitcoin world are extremely helpful and encouraging to a nurturing.

So someone I would think of, top of my head is like Steppen's Sniker. He makes some wonderful libraries I've used. Like he's made a really great Python library for Bitcoin. He makes an excellent Arduino library, which I've used for the hardware wallet in fact.

And he's someone who, you know, you can ask the dumb question and he's not gonna shoot you down, make you feel like an idiot, it's gonna encourage you. And I think that's good. He encourages you to carry on and you'll get there in the end sort of thing.

And I think that's why he's built up such a great community around the Spectre wallet. Yes, because it's because of that, because he's like welcoming and nurturing and everything. But there is in Bitcoin and it is the thing which has pushed a lot of developers away.

Pushed a lot of people away from Bitcoin as well. There is kind of a tech and it might be to do with like protocol consensus and it becoming a very, obviously something which you only want mega, giga brains involved in.

There has been a kind of techno, actually there's kind of been a, no, I wouldn't say actually from the protocol devs, the actual people working at a protocol level on Bitcoin, they're a bit like stepping, they're just super excited about this technology and they love it when people use it

and they like it when people ask them to do questions and whatever, they don't care. However, like the immediate layer, belief that there's kind of a technocratic vanguard, like a bit of an ego thing going on there.

And I don't think it's particularly welcoming for developers. Whereas, I don't think you get that in lightning so much. I think in lightning, people, they just, you know, they'd like people just building stuff, you know, rather than just talking how they want, they want people making things and they want to encourage that

and they want people to share like good ideas. And so yeah, so I think it's a much more encouraging development environment. - It's a different culture, isn't it? - Very much so, yeah, very much so.

- I mean, that makes sense, though. - Yeah, that kind of gatekeeping, vanguard, technocratic atmosphere, it might be a reaction to, you know, all the forks of Bitcoin and then people claiming that their fork was better than Bitcoin.

It might be some sort of defense mechanism. But no, I will say, you know, the Peter Wallace of this world and the new breeze, they're great, you know, and then yeah, that's that they act how other Bitcoin should act too.

But yeah, there is, there is, yeah, there's sort of a snootiness sometimes on the higher level Bitcoiners, which I don't think is encouraging for developers. - I suppose as well, when you're talking about lightning, it's the change is there because it's layer two, it's not like make or break stuff.

And I guess that allows for some more freedom. And it's exciting, like, you know, to see all the things that are happening so quickly, you know, it was only a couple of years ago where it was like, I remember basically there was no light, almost no lightning nodes on the network.

It was like, so, so niche. And it just seems to be exploding. You know, I think it's really cool. A lot of people aren't really into lightning and have their issues with it. But I can't see how we do the things that we dream of without it.

It seems to me that... - It's the, it's the credible things. - It's the payment, it's the payment rails. And, you know, rather controversially as well, it doesn't actually depend on Bitcoin.

It could use something else. So in our Salvador, I'm a big, I like non sort of non binary thinking. I don't think like good evil kind of thinking. I think it's pretty unproductive. So I think soft current, some soft currencies, they have some soft currencies have some use of functions,

such as, you know, the ability to kind of keep it stable. The ability to create more of it if you need to in a crisis. But those functions, they get co-opted and obviously corrupted by officials.

And then it becomes a lever of power. So you kind of want to throw the baby out with the bath water and you say, okay, we'll just get rid of soft currencies, just have hard currencies. But now it actually then lose, you know, so, you know, society, modern society, we need fiscal stimulus.

We need ways to create demand and aggregate demand and the best ways to do that are free soft currencies. But I do believe that somewhere like El Salvador, it has this hard currency option, savings technology, which people can use.

And they also have the USD. Now, for me, I would prefer some sort of stable coin on liquid, which can also use lightning network. So it's interoperable as, you know, an El Salvador dollar, something which is beyond the reach of the US government to take down, so some sort of federated model or something.

I'm really excited and interested in that concept. I understand that it sounds a bit shit coining, but it's like where you've got Bitcoin, yeah, you've got Bitcoin. So the number one issue people have with Bitcoin is this volatility.

The payment rails is fantastic, you know. - And we're on drug dealers and throwing them back. - Yeah, but I mean, as a medium of exchange, obviously, as the savings technology is wonderful, as a medium of exchange for your average El Salvadorian, who's might be unlike, I don't know, if it's average salary,

but if safe, they're only $200 a month. If Elon Musk then tweets something, and Bitcoin's price halves to $100, that's really bad for that person. He's had $200 a month. And it would mean that they won't use it.

They will use USD. And I prefer for them not to use USD. So I would prefer El Salvador to have some control, you know, collectively have some control over a soft currency. So anyway, you could use theoretically used lightning network on such a system, on that.

And so I think as a payment rails, no matter what happens, lightning networks here to stay, it works incredibly well. We're still like, that barely sort of a viable product. You know, like, I know it's been around for a few years, but it's still heavily underused.

It's not used like in huge production.

So sorry, my phone's going off, let me close that. It's not yet. So yeah, it's incredibly useful, good stable technology. And it will be the thing which the whole world uses with Bitcoin underneath it, of course.

And eventually, in Star Trek Utopia, we'll have just a Bitcoin backed value transfer, you know, and we'll just have Bitcoin, the interplanetary, universal, medium exchange, whatever. However, on that road, I do think we'll have federated soft currencies and other sort of assets and things issued, which can also be transferred

and also use lightning network or make use of lightning network for payment rails. - It makes sense. I mean, like you said, a lot of people can be very black or white with this sort of stuff, but you know, like you said, that there are certain situations where people don't want a savings technology.

They just want something that's fairly stable right now because they're not actually able to save, you know. So many people are just literally hand to mouth and then it's like, like you say, if it does halve, which you know, who's seen so many times, then it's like, oh, you can't feed your family then.

Well, how good was that for you in this situation? - Exactly. - Not very. So it's easy to sit, you know, if you are using Bitcoin as savings and say things like, oh yeah, everyone should just, you know, you've sat as the standard, but you know, it will come.

- Yeah, it will come. It's just not, it's just not there yet. So I'm not against these sort of stable coins and things 'cause they actually serve purpose for now. But it's, yeah, it'd be cool to see this sort of stuff on lightning though.

- Well, I mean, so within the Ethereum world with all this impatient people, the MakerDAO, they have made that sort of DAO, I don't know too much about it, but, you know, for my hear, it uses arbitrary, not arbitrary, arbitration opportunities to keep a stable peg by having a vault, and that vault is controlled by the MakerDAO.

Well, you know, that vault could be controlled by a federation, or like a liquid federation, liquid network federation, and it could have a similar sort of stable coin down top. I think the game is you make the best, you know, so you make the best soft, if soft currencies have lots of inherent issues and bugs,

but they do have some useful redeeming features, you make the least crappy version of a soft currency, and then people can use that until we get to that, you know, utopia where Bitcoin has so much liquidity in it that the price just stables somehow.

If we get there, great, but until we get there, yeah, it seems to make sense to give people the option of the least crappy soft currency they can have access to, and then also just like you, 'cause we can't, if you use liquid networking, liquid network tokens, you can have, they have done it so you have lightning on top of that,

so you can use lightning as the actual payment rails, which means you can then just fork, you know, things like Alan bits and get Alan bits running on it, and other wallets, and you can probably do some submarine swapping between, you know, Bitcoin on chain and this liquid Dow token thingy, theoretical thingy, whatever it is.

My current thinking is that if all countries with central banks are exploring making digitally native currencies controlled and regulated by the central banks, then countries without central banks, smaller countries relying on other currencies will start exploring these decentralized and federated

technologies to build their own digitally native soft currencies, and then the question is, you know, which direction do you want them to go in, and could it not be something which we use to kind of encourage people to use Bitcoin by using the same payment rails, and actually by using something which is leveraging

Bitcoin security to keep it secure and stable on a more base layer, so that to me, I mean, you know, the Chinese central bank, the Fed, the Bank of England, they're all exploring digitally native currencies, they're going to issue them at some point.

And, you know, for smaller countries like El Salvador, maybe it's within their best interest to not try and create a central bank, and then try and create a central bank controlled digital currency, but just use this technology which already exists to create something, you know, some sort of craft currency, and I think that will chip away

imperialism and the sort of neoliberal control which I think we're all into anyway, trying to sort of take, you know, loosen that grip over monetary control. Yeah, exactly, exactly. How, how confident are you generally in Bitcoin's ability to slowly take this power from the state around the world?

Like, how likely do you see it that this vision that a lot of Bitcoiners have of basically taking back some control because they have to be reined in. They can't just create value from creating no value, if that makes sense.

I think, yeah, I think it 100%, but it wouldn't be something, you know, look at their great depression, for example, you have a crisis about reproduction, and then countries just, if there's a gold standard, they'll just come off the gold standard, and they'll be pushed to do that,

because it's not within the interests of the savers of the people with the money to go off a gold standard. It's within the interests of the, you know, the citizens, the citizens of a country will just push any country.

If there's a crisis, you know, can the government turn around to a crisis of a production like the Great Depression and say to the people, the starving masses, don't worry, because eventually, after a decade or so, we'll have more efficient markets, and we'll all be better off for it.

It's not gonna happen. They're gonna, like, put in some crappy, you know, centralized, like, way of buffering that crisis. So, yes, Bitcoin can take away, and will take away the power of state over people by, you know, taking away their power over monetary supply and monetary control, but currently,

there does need to be some mechanism for buffering out some of that instability, while you don't have, you know, this utopian, whether it even exists, you know, holy grail of perfectly self-regulating, what's the word, markets, so yeah, so yeah, we will certainly get there.

There's a, I always like bringing this up, but there's a great concept by Engels and Marx, which is the withering of state, which is that when control is socialized, the state will become superfluous, and whither away and die, which you wouldn't think would come from Marx, 'cause obviously,

a lot of people consider him to be someone who caused things like the USSR and Mao and whatever else, we have quite varied, you know, very rationally, but the argument being that if you have the ability to have effective socialized control, decentralized control over things, big apparatus, then you no longer need these, you know,

these state apparatus, which are very easy to corrupt and very easy for control to end up in the hands of a few people, and in fact, this is a thing which most excited me about Bitcoin, so, you know, I would probably class myself as like an ideological anarchist, I guess, and, but my issue is always that, within anarchism,

you know, you have like democracy from the bottom up, and then you have sort of direct democracy, but the issue is sometimes like you need, well, for example, like a common, universally recognized medium of account, medium of exchange, you need like big apparatus for decision-making, and so, you know,

that's Bitcoin, isn't it, so you can have, you can have, you know, that kind of like anarchistry, but you can also have like this large self-governing, self-controlling, you know, douse, for example, whatever, you can have these big de-centralized organizations for decision-making, centralized decision-making, so yeah,

it's incredibly good for humanity, currently it's obviously a lot of sci-fi, hot air, a lot of bright, you know, starry-eyed ideology, but yeah, the technology sound, and free and open source money, man, like, look what free and open source software did, much more free and open source than we could do.

- Yeah, it's very exciting to see, and like you said, a lot of people who had those sort of libertarian or anarchist ideas before Bitcoin, it was very difficult to really explain and work out how the world could work, and I think now having Bitcoin and having these layer twos and having everything that's being built at the moment,

like you say, it is a bit sci-fi, and it is a long way away, but it's incredibly exciting, and when a lot of the world, when I look around, is going to shit, and there are just, like, just nutters everywhere, running around with diapers on their face, and trying to stab people with injections, and all sorts of crazy lunacy,

you know, you then just take a look at what's being built, and you go, oh, thank fucking God. (laughing) - I mean, we're probably on either ends of that argument, spectrum, but it doesn't matter, you know, you can, it's freedom of association, you can voluntarily associate with Bitcoin, you don't have to associate with it,

so you can have people with wildly different political views or, you know, whatever, world views, but then they can still-- - Money for an amaze. - Well, it's just dissident money, isn't it, currently?

I mean, it's, but eventually it will become just publicly, you know, a utility, a commons, a monetary commons for people, I think the biggest problem people have had with a lot of the COVID stuff is that it's kind of felt prescribed, obviously, and then the lockdowns, you realize it's not like society and state

has leveraged more control over us, it's just put in place the control it already had, but it just didn't actually enact, like it always had the ability to take your rights away, but it just didn't exercise it, so you wander around thinking you're free, blah, blah, blah, and then all of a sudden you're like, oh, okay, I'm not free.

(laughing) I think, you know, I can just be basically putting the house arrest, yeah, blah, blah, but then how do you challenge, I mean, obviously, for what I can tell, you don't think it's so much of an issue, but if you have like a global pandemic, maybe if you don't believe this is a global pandemic,

if there is one in the future, how do you challenge it? And like, how do you, how do you, one of the best ways to do it is to vaccination programs, always has been with viruses, and, you know, maybe let's not talk about COVID, but let's talk about, you know, virus X, like the one in, you know, 12 monkeys,

which does actually eradicate pretty much everybody on the planet, like, how do you tackle these big problems? And I do think that, yeah, like, collective decision-making, de-sexualised decision-making is very encouraging to see.

- Do you think, like, if you play that forward then, if people are gonna be making decisions and collaborating, but you don't have like one central point, you don't have like a hierarchical system, it's like a network of people making decisions.

Do you think the Bitcoin and private public key pairs and sort of this way of signing and proving that you are a person or an entity and that you want a certain thing to be done a certain way and that being recorded will sort of play into that?

- I think the day that captures become incredibly hard, passwords, too long to be able to remember, and we all, and people, just the general population has to get used to using public key crypto, will be a great day.

Not only because it will prepare, and it will happen, not only because it will prepare people for using something like Bitcoin, which makes ready use of that, and it still confuses people like keys, private keys and public keys.

Also, because it's just great for like, transferring ownership, you're empowering people with the keys of privacy, aren't you, to be able to have private communication. So, one of the things which a bunch of us Bitcoiners, and people working on it a bit as well, they've been really interested in

is that something a protocol called NOS star, notes and other stuff relays, which is where you have a public private key, and then you use a client to sign messages, and then send the messages to relays.

So, the example I gave of this is I made a Twitter clone, where you have, you know, you have your public, people can follow you through a public key, and you sign a message with a private key, and you use your ignore signatures as well, which is cool, ignore keys.

But you can, you know, using that, you could use a hardware wallet, for example. So, say if you've got like some Twitter account, like Coca-Cola or something, rather than, anyone being able to tweet out from it, it has to be like signed by a multi-sake in some sort of hardware wallet, or some president, you know, some wildcard president.

It could be something which could have to be signed before sending out the message, the notes. But another example, so, one of the first extensions I made on Ellen bits was something called Diagon Alley, and in Diagon Alley, it's a concept for a decentralized marketplace, where you have a market stall,

and the emphasis is on a market stall, and you have your products on your market stall, and then you just point it at any front end, and then the front end index is your market stall products, and then if a sale comes through, like it just requires an invoice directly from your server, and then someone pays it,

and then you also have like, you know, using keys or something, you would have the ability in Diagon Alley to have reputation, attached to your public key, which people could verify in some way.

Well, so Fiat, so Fiat Jeffers is the only person that's the other developer on Ellen bits, he was the only person who recognized Diagon Alley, which was kind of cool, and that then went on to inspire what became no star.

So for the hackers communication Congress, in a couple of weeks, the next extension I'm making on that bits is actually Diagon Alley, like two, the next Diagon Alley, and it's using no star network, so you have, you know, your products, and then you, you, you, you, it's a no star, the way no star network, it works is you have clients,

you have these relays, which relay information, the relays are very dumb, you can take them out, just a mark, so you can just spin them up easy, and then the clients can point any relays they want, and they can just send information through it.

So I can send my products to a relay, the relay could list on some front end website, and then it doesn't have to do any, you know, handling of any dasers, and have to have a database or anything, it's literally just like connected via web sockets, people can verify that I have reputation, 'cause of my public key, there could be a relay,

which maybe just handles reputation, or some way of connecting it to some sort of real world entity, I don't know, but then if like that gets attacked and taken out, I can just use a different relay service, so you end up with like a censorship resistant marketplace.

So that's, but that's using no star, and again, it's using, as soon as you kind of wrap your head around public key crypto, you start thinking about, you know, solutions and ideas like that, you know, for solving problems and for like asset, for moving assets and paying for things, and having a digital way of representing who you are,

and we've just got to get to the point where those captures get too hard, I'm surprised you're not already there, but it will be, it will be the answer, that people start the email thing, you know, you're trying to use email in the 90s and 30s, but now it's like a swipe on an iPad, it's that kind of scenario,

you've just got to kind of wait for everyone else to catch up. I tell you, do you know something you reminded me of then, was the, in Alan Bitz, one of the extensions was DJ Live Stream, which is so Crypto Graffiti, he did like a set, and he had a QR code on the screen, and people could tip him, and then if you tipped enough,

you would get a download link for the song. Yeah, yeah, which is cool. And then, that was it. - That's something to do with Jukebox, you had something as one of your. - No, that was the, that's the Spotify Jukebox one.

- That's the Spotify one. - Yeah, so this crypto cloaks one, what was cool about it was, and it was funny, 'cause it's not supposed to be picked up immediately, but like when you made a payment to it, 10% went to the DJ, and then 90% of the profits went to the producer, so it split the payment, and then we were like, oh cool,

you can split payments in Alan Bitz. So you've even now got a split payments extension, so you select a wallet, and you say, anyone who comes into this wallet, I want X% to go here, X% to go there, and then you point, you distribute amongst all these other wallets, which you can do in micro transactions.

So now, if you had a micro-eventual, like a bunch of people get together, they want to make a coffee shop. Okay, this app's a coffee shop. They say, well, who's going to get what percentage of each sale?

And then every time there's a point of sale, anyone working at a coffee shop, boom, they get their percentage in their phone, on their wallet, and they can see what's going up. Yeah, super cool.

So you could scale it up, and you could have it split, go to a wallet, split, go to a wallet, split, go to a wallet, so it could go to a department. So the idea is that you could have, with micro-transactions, you can have, so obviously, we've brought up the, you know, the whim of, you know, limited transaction size

with the legacy visa networks and things, and banking solutions, where you usually end up with big HR departments, but this all goes back to that next day, both social scalability thing, like with Lightning micro-transactions, you could have this crazy payment splitting.

So in the future, you might buy something in a shop, and then all the profit, you know, that sale, the money will go instantly to everybody working in that, and it might just be half a milli-stat here, a milli-stat there, but it will get split up and given to everybody.

And in fact, like, taxes could be paid at the point of sale. You're like, you could pay, and then your 20% of taxes could go, and in fact, like your wallet, you could even select you want, you could say, you know, I want 70% to go to education, 20% to go to, you know, the military, and you could actually select in your wallet,

what departments, what government sectors, you want your taxes to go to, and then suddenly taxes kind of becomes like some democratic. So just to, it's like these ideas, you have a new technology, like now we can do these sub-penny payments instantly.

Well, what can we build with it? And then you stumble across something, like the split payments thing, and then you're like, oh my God, like this could, that concept of splitting payments on such a small scale could revolutionize industry, could revolutionize the way in which we produce stuff.

And it's absolutely, it's a fascinating, it's something which I kind of want to explore more, but yeah, going back to that idea about how Bitcoin will change our future and affect our future.

I don't think we're gonna, it's not a case of our material world, which we have now will exist, and then it'll just be Bitcoin backed. It's a different, it's all, you know, common senses of the age, what we assume is reality and our materiality now, we throw out the window, and there'll be some different hyper,

hyper-productive, more, you know, fair world, which we wish we'd walk into. And so this is, ah, this is one of the cool things we wanted to build into core, actually, which I'll put out there just in case any more fancy's contributing to Alan bits.

Someone suggested, this is, I really like this as well. So with Alan bits, if you're running a server, you can charge a fee per transaction, there's a way of streaming some stats. The concept was that if you charge like 2% fee, you could give, you know, say I'm I-Bex, and I give a point of sale to a hairdresser, yeah,

I could then say to them, look, here's a referral link. If you give that referral link to somebody, you will then get 0.01% of every fee, which I then get, you know, to encourage them to propagate it.

And then that hairdresser gives it to another hairdresser, and then that hairdresser has someone in the shopping house who wants to accept Bitcoin, and they also have a referral link. So you could like create, you know, this like pyramid of referral links being given out for an Alan bits server install.

And that savvy original adopter of Bitcoin, the hairdresser, so the person at the top of that pyramid, like they'll just start having stats streaming into that. They'll be seen on the wallet they'll have all these stats coming, and they won't know where it's coming from, it's from random transactions in a shopping garage.

- It's their route in the payments. - Because all the payments, all those, well, it's all the, it's all the, basically, it's all the same Alan bits server. It's, you know, I-Bex is Alan bits server, and they're still getting 2%, and they're just allowing 1% of that 2% fee to be split amongst, you know, percentage-wise

amongst all these events, this referral scheme. Now, that is possible, and it's possible to have that money streaming, that referral scheme, and it's such an encouraging thing to have. You know, you don't just get a random check every month.

Like, you look at your phone and you've got an extra site, where did that come from, you know? You see the stats rolling in. So I can't wait for all that stuff to kind of be built, you know? - Me too.

- With lightning. - Me too. It's gonna be a very exciting time, and yeah, it's, all these things just, they blow my mind and get me very, very hyped. - Yeah, this is where, this is where all the, the new stuff comes in, isn't it?

Why people are kind of inspired to create art, and try and understand this new, these new concepts, is because obviously, it just triggers the imagination. All these things which are now possible, you know, so consciously triggers the imagination, and it creates in your mind, it's gonna create all these different versions of reality,

which then obviously you're gonna have to try and communicate some way or events and ways, so you kind of do it through the accretion of art. - Yeah. - So I think that's why there's lots of kind of, you know, the art scene on Bitcoin is so interesting.

I've been interested to see whether that continues. If it became like a standard, then would there still be art around Bitcoin? - I think it, it changes at that point, because, you know, like you said, I mean, a lot of the ideas that we're trying to convey, or artists are trying to convey are really,

well, they're world changing, but they're also complicated, and art obviously is a way of expressing that to people in a different way, but at the moment, it still feels edgy and different, and like people who are interested in this are outliers, it's not sort of, it's not the norm, and I think when it becomes, you know,

if it's like everyone uses it all the time, that, you know, that things will change, but... - Yeah, which kind of age past that, and then the distance will do your balls, and the weirdos will move onto something else.

- That's it. But that's, I mean, that's why 21ism do what we do, is like we try and get, we try and shed light on, not just, you know, developers and people who are doing the technical side, but also, you know, the artists, the musicians, the people who are trying to wrap their heads around this and allow others to do the same.

And, you know, it's a lot of fun working with these people, but with the big dreams, the big ideas, and yeah, it's fun to be around. - Well, that's cool, I mean, obviously some great art.

I mean, thanks so much for, yeah, producing all this content. I'm gonna have to go, 'cause I got to shoot, and I completely lost track of time, so much fun. - Me too. Well, thank you so much for chatting to me and everything that you do, and pushing these dreams further and further towards reality.

- Yeah, well, let's hope some of this weird sci-fi software art world will eventually be useful to somebody in the real material world, but if it's not, then it's just fun anyway, isn't it?

- Yeah, no, I'm sure it will be. - Yeah, thank you so much. Lovely to speak to you, and hopefully we'll catch up again soon.