EP79 Bitcoin podcast with @capoczino

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.

Alright, 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.

Welcome back to Bit by Bit. Today's episode is the Xeno. This was his first ever podcast, and I absolutely loved speaking to him. You probably noticed I had to keep trying to bring the conversation back to Bitcoin.

I was fascinated about the permaculture, which we got into, and yeah, I had to keep remembering and reminding myself that this was a Bitcoin podcast. But we covered loads of different topics.

It was really, really interesting to speak to him, and yeah, I think he's going to really enjoy it. Before we dive in, just want to say thank you to Coin4UK, my sponsors for the show. If you're in the UK and you've decided you are going to go KYC, I warn you about this.

I think it's best that you use Biska Huddle Huddle. But if you are going to use a KYC service, use a good one. And they certainly are. They've got a great team, and they're the only one that I suggest a friend and family.

Enjoy. Hey, Xeno, can you hear me? Yes, loud and clear. How perfect. I was having some problems connecting there. And my last one, I don't think connected with my microphone properly. So I probably screamed in your ears there, did I?

No problem, I also had more time to prepare myself. So you basically, you're going to put my podcasting cherry. Excellent. That's my favorite thing to do. They are usually the best, but I will be very, very careful with you, so don't worry, I won't be rough, you'll enjoy it.

Thank you very much. Looking forward. Yeah, I've been really looking forward to it as well. We chatted in the background first about the Rings of Fire staff, and you mentioned Perma culture, and all these things that we mentioned in the background.

So I've been-- I was saying to my Mrs. earlier, I was like, oh, this is going to be a good one. There's so much I want to dig into here. So I don't really structure these things, but I guess let's start at the beginning and talk about how you found yourself into this weird and wonderful world of Bitcoin,

and what it is that has really drawn you into lightning, particularly because Ring of Fire is quite an interesting project. It's something that makes a lot of sense to me the more I think about it.

So how did you get there? Were you already in tech or doing something completely different? Well, that's a lot to unpack there. Where do I start? I remember before I even started programming, I saw Bitcoin once on the internet, like this weird magical thing.

And I completely dismissed it. Like I had no money to spare. I mean, I was young. I still with my with my mom. And well, I tried mining on a shitty computer, which didn't work out. I don't know.

I don't remember the number, but I think it was something about at least 20,000 satoshis that I would like to have now with a nice bonus. But I just uninstalled it after I considered it pointless.

Then I just forgot about it and moved to Berlin still being fairly poor, like trying to study photography. And a friend of mine, he was like super excited about this. He told me about the halving.

I was like 2013 was still Silk Road was online back then. And I wish I had listened to him. Like just put a little bit of money there. But I guess we all have those regret stories. And I think he should regret it more because he spent it all on MDMA.

Oh, my god. I mean, the bills were nice. Like we had a good night after he told me about that. And he bought it. But man, money wasted right there. Yeah. That was early then. So to unpack that, yeah, I just threw like 20 questions at you right at the beginning.

All excited, so there's some packets. So photography was what you were going into study. You meet someone and this is in 2013, they're already talking to you about a halving event. So they presumably had looked into it a little bit more than just look, let's get some MDMA and have a good night.

Do you know why they decided not to buy any more after that if they'd already done the research or well, they had such a good night. They forgot about it afterwards. What happened there? I cannot speak for my friend.

I think he just was interested in getting to the drugs. I mean, the number one use case back then. And he didn't keep anything. And well, I suppose he just forgot about it, just keep on living his life.

And so that I like, I completely dismissed it. I told myself, well, I have no money. I can barely afford rent. Why would I want to invest into something I don't understand at all? So I went on a few years, like I moved to Spain following love, now living with my girlfriend.

And yeah, I started working at a company where we're doing lab design for online stores. And one of my colleagues was 2017 right after Bitcoin went from 1000 breaking the all-time high to 2000, 3000.

And this is when he started to be like, well, excited, like talking to everybody about crypto and oh my God, what's going on? I think we can make a lot of money there. And this is when I finally started to listen.

Unfortunately, I first dismissed Bitcoin. Like I went right into the shit coronary. I think many did the same in this times. Like everything seems so promising. And Bitcoin is like the old dinosaur tech.

Like, oh my God, what do we do? Three transactions per second? Wow, that's old tech, immediately fell for Dash. Oh my God. Oh no. Can you remember the time around that like 2017 where everyone was talking about like, ah, this is the first generation tech.

And then we've got blockchain 2.0 and then there's 3.0 and there's all these things. Oh, exactly, yes. Oh my God, yeah. And this is the blockchain of China and this is gonna be for tracking.

And this is, and now you look back and you think, oh my God, what was I thinking? But we have to go through that pain. We have to go through it. It's part of the learning curve. It's part of the journey.

Yeah. But it took me, it took me like until 2018, like right before Bitcoin fell from 6,000 to 3,000, then I was following a shit coin on YouTube. I don't want to mention his name, but he interviewed Tone Vase.

And this is like, when I watched this interview and just witnessing how Tone Vase basically just smashed that shit coin with like this argument of Bitcoin is better and everything else is just nonsense.

This is finally when I realized, oh my God, wait a minute, I was looking in the wrong direction and I immediately sold my shit coins and was ready for the Bitcoin dip because it really pointed towards it.

Like, of course, I followed Tone Vase. It was super bearish back then. And I'm kind of happy that I believed him at this point and did not believe him that you would go to 1,300, I think he said.

So I bought him right after that crash and never sold. Very nice. And your friend who got you in the web design friend, did he go Bitcoin only as well, or was he still shit coining? He was longer shit coining than I was.

At some point he was forgetting about because everything crashed and I tried to just convince him, come on, just sell whatever you have on Binance, just get rid of it and buy Bitcoin and he did.

And when it crashed last year in March, I told him like, this is the chance to get into Bitcoin. If you still want to buy, do it now. I had the time I didn't have money. Like I spent everything.

I had left my bank account on land in the house. Like a decision, I regret a little, but I think actually not really like it's nice to have some security in form of land, and potentially somewhere I can live without paying rent anymore being on my own self sovereign in a way.

- Absolutely. It gives you a clear of mind as well, I think. You can go all in to the point where you're so stressed and barely able to live and you know, it can go your way and it can be great, but equally you can go through a few years of not having a clear mind.

And I think that's very, very valuable. So having just something where you know if it was to go wrong, you have your land, you have your house, I think is pretty reasonable and pretty smart thing to do.

- Yeah, just the timing was not perfect. Like when I think about what if I would have put all the money in Bitcoin instead, I could now buy six times the land.

- Yeah, it's crazy how that happens, isn't it? I often look around, you know, I've sold all the stuff in my house and sold everything that I could, but you know, there are some things left and I'll walk past like, oh, if I just sold that, I could have bought another seven of them or I could have bought whatever else.

And you start to sort of value everything in Bitcoin terms and I don't know that it's very helpful to do it, but certainly you can't help it at this point. - I love that, like there is this pressure against mass consumption with a lot of people I feel have like they try to buy things, they cannot even afford, mostly out of reasons

that don't benefit the lives, it's just like having a status symbol. And this is what I really love about the Bitcoins. Like I consider those people real Bitcoins who stop and think for a moment, do they really need the stuff that they're going to buy?

And who value this in Bitcoin really helps because yeah, you see that like if you just hold off for a little longer, if you don't read it right away, you can afford more later. And this saving mindset is something I admire.

- It's nice as well, it's a bit more peaceful because you realize a lot of the stuff when your brain's ticking away, oh, you know, I want this, I want that. And like you say, there's all this pressure.

The more you get used to not having it and the more you're training and hobbling, you do get to this sort of peaceful mindset where you're like, what do I really need? There's not that much.

There are certain things you need like a tool, like a laptop you need for work or you need enough clothes to get by. And you need, you know, the absolute basics, but a lot of the other stuff, the more possessions you have, they own you at the end of the day because you've got to take care of them.

You worry about them, it takes up more space, it takes up more time and that sort of idea of just having really good quality things that you look after and you only replace when you absolutely need to.

It's just a nicer way of living. And it's, you know, all this environmental talk that people throw at Bitcoin. It's like, have you seen how the average person consumes shit and then throws it away a year later?

And you look at the average hodler how they live, who's better for the environment if you want to take it there. And it's pretty clear that that high-time preference, shitty manufactured goods that people just throw away, cheap, shitty clothes that they want to change after they've worn it a couple of times to show off to their friends.

And all that kind of fiat culture is counterproductive. - Exactly, yeah. Like I wish we could put it somehow in numbers. Like if we could weigh it against like what the critics say how Bitcoin is polluting the environment against this fiat mindset of mass consumption and what those effects actually then are.

But yeah, this is really hard to calculate. And I think that's why also Bitcoin always gets a bad rep because you can just put it in numbers and make it really, really scary sounding. But then they also don't look further.

Like I just wondered how much in comparison to other things does Bitcoin actually pollute the environment like in CO2 terms? - So Bitcoin has around 17 million tons of CO2, but agriculture has around 2,000 million.

Like this is a vastly huge number in comparison to what Bitcoin does. And we just destroy our lands because nobody gives like much thinking. And well, that's why I really, really like what untapped growth is currently doing with is a cattle co-op.

Like regenerative farming is something I really look up to. Like I want to also go into this myself. Like as I told you before, I am interested in permaculture and how we can regenerate our lands.

- It seems there's a common theme with Bitcoiners in terms of wanting to get land, wanting that self-sustainable life, wanting quality meat and fruit and vegetables, or some just meat, but yeah, it seems a common theme.

And it's almost returning back to how things were. It's like a more sustainable, more natural way of doing things and having a bit more connection to nature, which I find quite interesting because a lot of people and yourself included are very techy, you know, devs and people who work with tech all the time.

But it seems that actually a lot of those same people want to be around nature, which is not something that I see that much of in the rest of society. Like there's so many people who just want to be in the cities.

They want to be near the bars and just have the convenience and coffee shops and that kind of stuff. You know, if you said to the average person, "Oh, you know, wouldn't it be nice to have some land and chickens and cattle and whatever else?"

And you grow your own veg and do all of that. They generally have no interest, whereas more and more Bitcoin as I speak to have this idea and this sort of dream of their citadel and living off the land, which is exciting.

I love the idea of it myself. I think you said you looked into or got into permaculture prior to Bitcoin, is that right? - Mm-hmm, yeah, like, yeah. - And so how was that? How did you find permaculture and how did you get interested in that?

- Well, my permaculture rabbit hole story started with finding out about earthships. I don't know if you ever have heard of those. - Not unless it's some sort of alien spaceship thing. - It could look like quite esoteric, if you see it for the first time, it's kind of spacey.

It's like, it started in the desert of Laos or Laos, I think, in the US, by a guy called Michael Reynolds and they call him the garbage warrior because he was thinking about how could we use waste material to build housings?

And he experimented with some cans building walls with those, but then he also figured out that he could build really thick walls out of tires. Like you just fill them with soil, you compact the soil and then start stacking them.

And this is then the foundation for what he calls "nurship" where he plies some principles of, I think a lot of those principles are permaculture related because he's trying to maximize the energy that is coming into the house, like the sun he's trying to catch most of it in the winter and blocks in the summer.

And the water they collect through the rain has cycled a couple of times before you actually then put it out to sewage treatment. So like the water comes from the rain, you use it for drinking or cooking or showering.

Then this water goes to the plants inside and whatever the plants don't drink is then directed to the toilet where you flash it for the last time. And when I study that, it made so much sense to me like you could save a lot of effort and energy.

We put currently in our houses like, we use water once, for example. And it's frankly, it's kind of wasteful. Like we could do much, so much more with it. And when I learned about "urships", I started to look around and I see how, I would say how damn we mostly design our houses because we don't think about the sun,

we don't think about the rain water that we could collect. And it's quite the opposite. We try to divert the water away from our houses instead of using it right away. But then we have a centralized system, somewhere a company making sure that the water we get from our taps is always available and pressurized

instead of taking care of ourselves. And this whole off-grid living style really, really fascinated me. And through "urships", then I learned about permaculture because a lot of principles were buried, very borrowed there, and discovered that there's so much more to it.

Like, especially when it comes to agriculture and farming, how currently like we just strip mine, like I think you read the article, I don't remember by who it was, capital strip mine with the comparison of farming that we just mine our lands and take everything away without giving back, basically destroying our lands

and permaculture is reverting this process by applying design principles that actually make sense that you, the energy you put in is recycled a couple of times which creates a positive feedback loop which just leads to you storing more and more energy on your land.

And then again, like I started to look around and see how conventional agriculture is being done nowadays. And with this knowledge of what I learned through studying permaculture, I always think like, oh my God, why don't they put some swales there to collect some rainwater which is then infiltrated into this soil

so the plants have more and, well, yeah. - And why do you think from what you've learned, why do you think it is that none of them are taking on these ideas and these designs, is it that they just don't understand it or aren't thinking about it or is it the way the current sort of agriculture and farming systems are set up

that they can't take a step back. They have to just continue on the route they're on and can't think about trying something new. Is there any logic or is it just pure stupidity? - Hey, wondered this myself.

I wouldn't say that farmers are necessarily stupid but I think a lot are in a pretty inconvenient position. I've heard a lot about farmers being indebted and basically they just have to do what they're being told so they can make it from month to month.

But then there are also a lot of regulations that make things difficult to change. - It's an interesting subject because there's nothing really more important to us than having energy food, water, it's all key stuff and you would think that that would be a problem that we would be looking to fix as a society

in the same way we should be with money and there are two incredibly important things and we're sat here and we're picking holes in both of them and it's like, I don't know, I find it strange that these things just don't seem to change.

They seem to go even further away constantly and then maybe you're right, maybe it is regulation. It seems to be a problem with almost everything. It makes things more complex, more costly, harder to innovate and it's a real problem.

- Yeah, it's incentive structures. They don't seem to align. They make things worse than better. - And is it something that you are currently implementing yourself, permaculture, is that something you're doing on your own land?

- Yes, I am working on that very hard. Like, this is one of the reasons where I really was eager to get my own land so I could finally apply everything that I have learned and I think I'm a complete new loop.

I'm just starting out and there's so much to discover just by doing it and studying the land right there in front of you instead of just watching videos or reading articles. And currently I have like my planners to kind of like grow food forest.

So get it real, real lush with trees and shrubs and everything. Like try to just stack everything on top like from the smallest plant to the biggest, which is trees. And currently I grow around 300 Laguminos trees which are supposed to be the pioneers because they grow fast and the plan is to provide shade

as quickly as possible because I'm living here in Spain and the sun and summer can be quite brutal. And naturally the soil just dries out and then your plants die if you cannot water them.

So that's my number one priority right now to provide shade and water, mostly I'm trying to collect it through the rain, which we don't have so much but still fairly a lot. And if you study like with the soils degraded, a lot of water is for example, it's just running off off of your land and it's gone.

You cannot get it back. So my plan is to do some earth works like the so-called swales where you just dig trenches with what's called a spoil on the other side. So when it rains, all the water collects there and has then time to infiltrate the soil.

And once it's under the soil, the sun cannot easily evaporate it neither can the wind. - Yeah, so otherwise it would just sit on the top because it's already hard and dry the soil from the heat.

And then it just sits and evaporates. - Oh, if you're lucky it sits there. If you're not lucky and you have a slope, it just runs off. - Mm, yeah, that's clever. And once that shade is there, so in Spain, you can grow a lot because you have the weather for it.

So what would you have like all fruit trees and all the different vegetables and would you have livestock as well? - Permaculture done right includes livestock. Our land is not as big and I have never seen cows anywhere around, our neighbors have some pigs to know if we're gonna have pigs,

but checking is definitely something I'm considering. Have a steady supply of eggs. They can also, that's the idea, like in Permaculture, if you include livestock into your system, then they take off a lot of work for you because if you study animal behavior, for example, chicken, they start scratching the soil

and this is also what Nanya recently posted that he just spreads out some seeds and the chicken they eat most, okay, but they also scratch a little and the seeds then go into the cracks of the soil so you don't have to take care of it.

And you just use, you leverage the natural behavior of those animals to do the work for you. So the idea is basically you try to do minimal work for the biggest impact. And at the same time you try to keep the energy, you receive new system inside your system and prevent it from running out, like their inputs and sinks.

And this comes back to the circulation of water and of nutrition, of nutrients. And a lot of this is also what Untapped Growth is doing. Like the cows, they do the job for him to regenerate the soil.

So he does have to do nothing. He just says to make sure that the cows don't over-grace in one spot, move them a couple of meters like every few days and he can then sit back, just enjoy life, basically.

But yeah, he's using the time to spread it among the people. I really like what he's doing. They bring those who have the land and the livestock together with those who want to work. And it's quite a fascinating system.

- Do you have any views on energy production? I mean, being in Spain, does it make sense for you to have solar or do you stick to grid power? Are you trying to go completely off-grid with everything?

- We are completely off-grid. Like I think it wouldn't even be economical to try to lay some cables to our house. We're quite far away from the next city. So solar power naturally, maybe wind, let's see.

But also at the same time, we try to reduce our energy. Like as I told you with a ship principle, like trying to catch the sun in winter and shading it in the summer. Currently we don't have any air conditioning or also, I don't think we need it.

Because in winter, the temperature was steadily above 12 degrees and outside it went below zero at some point. And in summer, on the other hand, we already experienced outside it's close to 40.

And inside it's nice, nice at 25. Like I think we can still optimize there, but just having thick walls, like, okay, we don't have those tile walls. We got a nice house with half a meter thick stone wall.

And they do so much of putting the temperature in equilibrium 'cause of something called thermal mass. When the sun hits the walls, they just absorb the heat. And then at night when it gets colder, they just release it again through it at radiation.

And the opposite effect in summer, outside it's so hot, but the walls still have stored less heat. So they absorb the temperature that is above that. So literally keeping the house colder.

- Do you have any issues being further out with internet problems or are you set up in a way that you can work from home or are you going to an office or how do you cope with being sort of off-grid in that sense?

- Yeah, I hope for Starlink to finally kick off 'cause then I could just be there at home having reliable internet. - I think bad as it's just ordered one. I think they are gonna be available now with not then very, very soon.

- Yeah, pretty soon. I mean, okay, satellite internet is nothing new, but I think it's quite expensive and probably not even reliable. Haven't looked into it that much, but also on the land, when I'm there, I have 3G because there's somewhere a tower nearby in a mountain.

So maybe we don't even need Starlink, we could just link with this tower and then have steady internet, hopefully. But this is something I worry about in the future, but theoretically, it's a good thing about being a programmer.

You can be anywhere in the world. You don't have to go to an office. And I already moved away from the capital city, not the capital city from Barcelona. I can say that because I don't live there anymore.

(laughing) But certainly in the office, I was working as long as I lived in Barcelona. Of course, my boss insisted, yeah, please come to the offices better for cooperation and everything.

But I asked him if it would be okay to just move into the country's height already to be close to the build. Still not living in the house, but I really want to move there, hopefully within a year.

But he said, like, no problem. Just keep it quiet. So the others don't get jealous of him. That they have to go to the office. But then Corona happened and everybody has to work from home.

So this privilege is already gone. - That's true. (laughing) That's very true. - Yeah. - Yeah. - It really just showed that as a company, we can just function without going to an office. - And without doxing yourself too much, what sort of dev work is it you're mainly doing?

Is it web design still or, you know, I know you're very interested in lightning and working with that. Do those things merge or is it something completely different? - Well, it's different.

I mainly work with online shops. So mostly front-end work, but also including some back-end. I actually shifted to back-end, but it feels a lot like front-end because we all use JavaScript, the language in the front-end and the back-end.

And I wish I would be able to code, like on Bitcoin Core or on Lightning. But they use it in programming language, I have not studied yet, most of the cases, but some implementations for lightning I've seen, they use the stack I'm familiar with, so I could probably interface there.

I did one commit. I want pull request for mempool load space, like just fixing some minor style bug. So this is my contribution so far towards Bitcoin. - That's very cool. - It must be nice to be able to actually sort of make changes and be able to affect how this thing moves because, you know, as a non-technical person,

I've tried a little bit of programming I've learned, like a tiny bit of CSS and Java and all those kind of bits, you know, on one of these 10-week courses and forgotten most of it. But I enjoyed what I did, but I always sit and think, oh God, I'd love to be able to make some changes and be able to build some things myself,

but it's all just dream stuff and not capable of it. What made you change? 'Cause you were saying that you were going into photography and obviously now you're doing programming. What made you change or did you start with one and then switch across after some time?

Was it Bitcoin that got you interested in it or something different? - No, no, definitely not. Bitcoin was around the time when my friend told me about Bitcoin for the first time and it's been at all on drugs, but at this point I was poor, like, as I told you, barely scratching up the money to pay the rent.

So naturally I had a part-time job working for a finance company, doing some front-end work. Like I was tinkering before, like, trying to build little websites and my own home page interested me before.

So to get some money in for the studies, I worked part-time and, yeah, it turned out that I couldn't afford studying photography anymore. I went to a private school and the tuition was too high for me, so I gave the app unfortunately.

I still like to take photos as a hobby, but it's not going to turn into anything professional, that's for sure. And yeah, after a while you just learn to do those things by doing, like, I think the best way to learn programming is just facing problems.

Like you do what you can, and as soon as you don't know how to proceed, you just turn on the search engine, look up for the solution to a problem, 'cause in most cases somebody already asked a question similar to yours, and there is this website, this brand and website, Stack Overflow where people ask

probleming questions, and there's almost all the time somebody who gives you the solution, but not just the solution for copy and paste, but also explaining the reasoning behind. So you learn all the stuff just by being into it, it's just tense on approach, and over time, you just get used to it and you start just knowing things

out of your own memory, out of your own experience. - Yeah, that's the way with everything, isn't it? The more you do something, the better you get at it. I guess you kind of, you have to enjoy that process.

Do you enjoy the sort of fixing of problems and puzzle solving? - Yes, yes, very much. Like, I just cannot get bored of it. (laughing) And I think that also makes me, maybe, I don't want to boast, but I think I'm a good programmer because I stick with the problem until I get it solved.

Even if it takes me hours or days, like, it just keeps bugging me and I want to solve it. - And when you do solve it, does that excite you when you've done it and then you want to get onto the next thing, do you ever sort of have a problem that's a large problem, you get it done, and then you think, oh, do you know what,

I need a little bit of time away from this, or are you always onto the next thing, always onto the next challenge? - No, definitely, I need breaks, especially after bigger projects. I think, like, for example, the Citadel game I'm programming.

After I've published this and it's pretty much done, I think I'm gonna need to take a break from this. - Can you tell me a bit about it? I know you've said in the background a couple of things, but I don't want to let the cat out the bag, so what can you tell me about the game?

- Well, I'm very transparent about the game. Like, I give updates regularly when there's, like, a major thing that I just implemented. Still trying to keep some things under red because I don't want to spoil everything.

But, yeah, like, as you might have seen, I've tweeted about it, it's about Hoddlenaut and Katoshi, like, those are the two main characters, and you just follow them on their journey, like, in a parallel universe where it's already more dystopian than it's in our world.

Like, the government's already, like, really showing their teeth and trying to keep the population in check with violence. And, of course, there's all this shit coinery going on, so there, naturally, some shit coiners also have to fight.

And, currently, I am at the last stage, which is the Citadel. Like, at some point, you finally reach the goal where you find, you appear as the other Bitcoiners in the Citadel, and they're, I'm currently just programming the Beach Party, like you take the boat with Nakadaimon as a captain, and he brings you through the Citadel

after you paid an entrance fee, which is half a Bitcoin in the game, which you first have to earn. And then at the Beach Party, of course, there's gonna be the Lombata and a lot of Bitcoiners dancing there, currently trying to find a lot of characters I can just implement there.

So, I just want to get the essence of what is happening right now in our culture into this game, just condense it there. Everything I hear here and there, like quotes or memes, pack them into the game to have something that we maybe look back after a couple of years and say, like, yeah, this is how it was back then.

- And so it's like, it's a single player game. - You can actually play two players, but on one computer. I already opened that in, so one person could play Hodler North and the other one Katoshi.

- And is it on PC only, or like, how do people access it? Is it just PC? - It works on mobile as well. Like, it's just a web app, so to speak. You can open it in your browser, you can play it on your computer or on your phone, try to make sure that it works smoothly on both devices.

So, unfortunately not on PS5 unless some major company contacts me and wants to have it on there. Well, I think it's too niche for that. But yeah, it's mostly a labor of love. Like, I just want to give back to the community through that to have something we can just enjoy once in a while.

- Is there lightning included? Is it, are you using lightning in it for anything? Are there sort of stats that can be collected or Easter eggs or any sort of way this is connected to the lightning network at all?

- Many people are asking me this. Like, I think it's a natural question because we see lightning and popping up. - Like Sabotee and all these guys who are sort of-- - Fun again as well. - Yeah, yeah.

- Mint Gorgs. I would like to, but honestly, I don't know quite yet where it would fit. Like, I thought maybe okay, like the entrance fee to the Citadel, maybe the user could pay a lightning invoice and maybe earn somewhere back the stats.

But currently, I prefer to keep it all just virtual so it's not real Bitcoin you pay. But if somebody has a brilliant idea how we could include lightning in there, I welcome it. But currently, I want to focus on the main story and keep it as something rather like timeless that you can even play offline.

- Yeah, it's really cool. I love how people are coming up with all these different ideas. And you said you're trying to encapsulate what's going on now and show what's happening in this culture.

And I love that more and more people are wanting to do that and more and more people are coming up with incredible different ideas of how to do it. And it's something I'm sure that when we look back, 10 years, 20 years from now, these kind of things will be very special and people have very fond memories

because this is right at the beginning of it all. So it's, yeah, it's just lovely to see. And it's such an organic filler. Most people who are doing this stuff are doing it. It's like you said, it's a labor of love.

It's something where you want to sort of leave your mark and create something that the plebs can play with. And yeah, it's very exciting. I'm not really a gamer, but I very much want to give this a go now.

- Yeah, when it's ready, I will definitely make some wind about it. Like I also, I'm not a gamer anymore. Since I moved out of my mom's place from home, I completely stopped gaming because I started living.

Like before that, I was rather like a lonely child, so to speak, and found my world in playing PlayStation. So I'm familiar with the gamer world, but with the gamer world of the past, like what is happening nowadays with nowadays, with Fortnite and all this, I cannot follow up on that anymore.

It's completely alien to me already. It's crazy how quickly those things develop sometimes. - It's so fast, isn't it? I don't think I've really gamed for probably 15 years or longer. And I used to, like a lot, I used to love like I had the first GTA game.

I had Crash Bandicoot. I don't know if you remember that, like I used to. I loved how you could sit and play Crash Bandicoot forever. I had all the first Game Boy and a time crisis and those sort of things.

And I loved all that when I was younger, but if I jump on a game now with anyone who's played it even once, I just can't. I don't know what's going on. I just, I'll stand there and just get shot and die within a second.

It's just so fast, these things have moved on so much. But it's definitely an interesting area. And I think there's definitely gonna be some sort of synergy with Bitcoin, with Lightning, with gaming.

And that's gonna be very exciting to watch PlayOut because I can see that developing very, very fast. And it's just one of those applications that makes sense to me with Lightning. It's something that just logically is going to fit.

And I think once people get used to it, there's no real going back. Do you have any views on that? Do you have any ideas on, you know, obviously, you're very into Lightning. Do you have any predictions on where this thing goes or where you think the best fit is and where this thing is going to maybe go a little bit more mainstream?

- I think if I try to predict it, I will probably be very wrong. Speaking about the presence, like I totally agree with you. Like it makes so much sense to include Lightning into games. And I think it provides a great hook for the younger generation to get to know Bitcoin.

And for this reason, I always try to shield those games to my cousins and my little brothers. Say like, here, look, look, you can earn real Bitcoin just by playing. But unfortunately, they're not interested in that.

I hope that this is just my family that is a bit weird because frankly, nobody of my family is Orange Builder. I'm the only one still trying to convince them somehow. I stacked a little for my two brothers.

So if the coin finally flips, maybe then I can just say here, there is something I have for you. You don't have to start from zero. Yeah, but it's probably, I guess they also have this mindset that I had when I first heard about Bitcoin.

Like, I don't have the money right now. I try to make it to the month. I cannot say it, but naturally they actually save like for holidays and everything, but in euros. And now being like on the other side, having made this journey, maybe halfway through, I don't know where this journey ends and the Bitcoin rate at all.

But I already see that saving makes so much more sense in Bitcoin, so much more because nobody can take it away from you in any way. Yeah, it's a big idea though, isn't it? And I would say that probably 90% of the Bitcoin as I speak to and myself included, no family or and basically no friends care at all,

have any interest, don't want to hear about it. And I think it just comes down to it. It's just, it's a huge idea. And it's very difficult to explain it and sort of almost until you understand all of it, or most of it, just saying to someone, oh, storing this thing.

They just see it as like a stock is what most people seem to say to me. Oh, why would I save in a stock? You know, if I say 500 pounds or 500 euros and I need that for my holiday, then I know I've got that.

And it's like, yeah, but the purchasing power is going away. They don't get that bit. They're like, because they see the nominal value stays the same and they're just fixated on that. So these fluctuations concern them.

And they just, they don't want to take the time to look into it anymore. So I think that's really nice that you've done that for your brothers. I think sometimes it can get to the point where you go, oh, fuck it, just HFSP.

You want to just let people get on with it and not speech them again. But it's nice if you can do that and stack a little bit and not do the, you know, I told you so, but just be there when they need it.

- Yep, I mean, it's family. Like even if they have an express hostility towards Bitcoin, at least a plus, cannot imagine how it would be for someone who go to the family during Christmas or Thanksgiving and then confront all those negative views about it.

I think my family rather, like they don't care so much. They're ignorant, like not in the sense of being ignorant, but ignorant, they just, it's out of the radar. Yeah, I just try to constantly nudge a little when it makes sense, but it's a long process, but it just shows how early we still are.

Like we're still at the bottom of the S-curve that is now slowly moving up and-- - Absolutely. - Yeah, there will be a point they're gonna have to move because you either go with it or you will go under.

- Eventually, eventually. There's another thing that I like about lightning is I like this ability to set someone up with a wallet, send them a few sats and just show them. I think that's really powerful.

Even if it's a custodial wallet, just so you can demonstrate to them and say, look, I've just sent you a payment, you could be anywhere in the world and I've just sent and you've got it, and it's there now.

That instant payment and then being able to see it and you say you've got that, that's yours, as long as you have these keys, I think that sometimes is more powerful than banging onto them about monetary policy and going into all the stuff that we'd like to go into sometimes just showing them something

in a five minute period where they can see it and feel it is more powerful. Have you had experiences like that with lightning or been able to convert people showing them this technology? - Unfortunately not.

I did exactly the same with my two brothers, like, I told them here, you can download this app, I'm gonna send you a few sats, a couple of thousand sats, but they didn't see the value, like there was still this disconnection, but I'm at the experience what really convinces people is number go up technology.

- Yeah. - I have a few friends who invested some chunk and there were of course there were uncertain at the beginning, but I was lucky enough to convince them at the time, but it was only going up like right before Sailor, for example, announced his Bitcoin holdings and micro strategy.

And when people see that all of a sudden, they become very convinced, like it definitely helps. It's not everything because they might still think about like, okay, when can I sell, or how do I sell?

It's this threaded question that I sometimes get, and I'm just like, now it's not the moment to sell unless you really need it, do you really need it? No, okay, then don't sell. - Do you know what I found is a really good one for that?

When people are saying they're about to sell, I always used to do, just say, oh, no, don't, you know, this is going up forever, Laura, don't be stupid, like, you know, go into the wise and a lot of the time that wouldn't really work.

What I now do is just go, yeah, yeah, that's fine. If you want to sell, I don't advise it, but sell it to me now, I'll give you the cash. And when they're presented with that and they can see that you want it, they don't want to sell.

'Cause they're like, well, hold on. Well, so you want it? You're like, yeah, yeah, this is going up forever. I want it, I'll buy it off you. Thank you very much, I'll give you the cash now.

And that stops them almost every single time. And if it doesn't, you get some KYC free sets. - That's true, man. - Yeah, just have to show conviction, let's teach them by living the truth.

- Yeah. - That's true. I do exactly different though, like, I say, okay, like, I will always buy it from you at a specific price. Like, if it ever goes, for example, below $30,000, I will still buy it from you for $30,000.

So this is your price flaw. I promise you, I will buy it because I want it. For me, it would be a great deal. So that gives them, like, the assurance that they won't lose money. I actually still make money.

And that also seems to quiet down the idea of, can I sell now? - Yeah, that's a good one. - It's really good to always offer that you are going to buy it from them. It just shows that you're very convicted, like, convinced about it.

- And it works both ways. - It works, the color, shit, I don't know the English. It's a good expression for that. Like, you color them in a way, like, with orange. - Yeah, because you just glow so much of orange that they also get a bit of a color 10.

- Yeah, well, we all glow orange, don't we? It gets to a point where you have to, and it's almost like it's the way you see the world completely changes, and it changes so much of the way you think about things.

And it's difficult to hide that. It definitely gets to a point where you're just like, I'm not gonna shove it in people's faces, but you will definitely have a certain way about you and a conviction on things that I don't think is found in many other people.

- No, like, when I discovered the Bitcoin community, I was amazed by how motivated the people are. I haven't seen that anywhere else before. Like, the motivation to just keep building things to improve yourself, be it in the mind, in the body, or financially, it's very inspiring.

Like, this is what I really love about this community is that we keep inspiring and motivating each other to just do better for yourself and for the world. It's amazing to see, and it's addictive.

It always makes me come back on Twitter or on Telegram and to the groups and just be with the people. - It's a great thing to be around. There's an old saying which is, you become the people you surround yourself with.

It's very true. Like you're saying, if you're around people who are looking after themselves, constantly improving, they inspire you and they make you want to do better yourself as well. You surround yourself with people who just winge and complain and hate their job and want to bitch about politics

and whatever else they want to talk about. You end up becoming that person. You end up not really having the passion. You become negative and it's not a good space to be around. So, you know, all this talk about how Bitcoin, Twitter, being toxic is utter fucking nonsense because they're the most positive, helpful group of people

I've ever come across in my life and it is addictive to be around. It is, it gives you hope. Being around this space and getting to speak to the people I get to speak to constantly gives me hope constantly makes me excited about the future.

And when everything else around this space is so bleak and so dark and so shitty, it's very, very comforting to have that. It's something that I can't imagine being away from. Do you ever think that?

Do you ever think like, fuck what would I do if Bitcoin wasn't here tomorrow? Like somehow this scene just somehow was just gone. Could I go back to a normal life and without it? And I think it would be a very weird adjustment.

I would definitely not enjoy that. - No, me neither. If for whatever reasons, our ways of communication was suddenly interrupted, I wouldn't know what to do. Like, I think the first thing I would try is to somehow get back in touch with all the people I have met in this space.

And that's why I really appreciate what SolarExporter and some other EU clips are trying to do is to organize some local meetups around Europe and to build a chain of trust, I think is also the exact words but SolarExporter used.

So we have somewhere a backup and really be in touch physically, not only digitally and something also that currently is really missing because we are all locked down. We can barely travel or if you want to travel, you have to comply to a lot of rules and it just seems to get worse right now.

And yeah, we really think we need to connect even more beyond the digital realm to really make this happen, like, especially when it comes to rebuilding the world, like with Citadel's and everything.

It's a great meme, like the Citadel meme is also the driving force that wants to bring Bitcoin us together, I think. - Absolutely, and having that physical connection that you're talking about is so important.

It's something that I really look forward to hopefully when all this bullshit is over is to spend some more time with Bitcoin as I'm lucky enough to be close to a few of the boys from 21ism, so occasionally I get to see them.

But outside of that, I don't really get to catch up with anyone, if we go back a couple of years, Europe was such an easy, I could jump on a plane and be in Barcelona in a couple of hours for basically no money.

- Yeah, it was great, wasn't it? A couple of years ago, I did it for about 25 quid or something like that, I just went for the weekend for a laugh 'cause the flight was cheap and you could get an Airbnb and it's like, well, why not?

I really hope that we get back to that because it would be great to have these kind of meetups and I actually like the idea, and Solax was talking to me about this on the pod, he was like, just smaller groups where you can really connect, you can really have these proper, deeper conversations.

And as much as I like the idea of the big things like the Miami Conference and that kind of stuff, I'm not really into big crowds or all that kind of stuff, but if there were smaller gatherings in outdoor spaces and yeah, you've got to really connect, I can't think of anything better.

- Yeah, I'm seeking that too. Like, I haven't met a single Bitcoin on real life so far. - Really? - Yeah, like, there's nobody around me that I'm aware of. Maybe I need to try to reach out more to Spanish Bitcoiners, but they seem to be more rare breed, I don't know.

Maybe they're not like on the English Twitter, like maybe there's a Spanish site of Bitcoin Twitter that I haven't discovered yet. - Yeah, I think there's quite a big Spanish community. Who was it who was saying it to me the other day?

I think it's in that, I think the Ronan Dojo and Samurai community got a pretty big Spanish following, but I don't know if that is actually in Spain, Spain, or just Spanish speaking. I'm not 100% sure.

- Most Bitcoiners I follow on Twitter that speak Spanish or from South America, or like in America in general. - Yeah, it makes sense. - Yeah, I think they also needed more urgently than actual Spaniards.

Like we are still living in a privileged country or continent where we have not really the need to use Bitcoin, but we are preparing ourselves to eventually make use of that. But yeah, like some people definitely benefit from Bitcoin more than we do right now.

Like for us it's just nice way to get ready for when everything falls down, but not that we would be worse off if we didn't have it. Like we would still have a fairly well standard of living.

- Yeah, I mean, for now. For now, certainly where this all goes over the next five years with these vaccine passports and all the crazy stuff that we're seeing at the moment, I'm not so sure.

I certainly sleep better at night, knowing that I have some Bitcoin, knowing that it's gone through Whirlpool, knowing that it is secured properly and knowing that even if things get really, really bad, they can come and take my property with ease if they want to, they can come and take whatever they want really in the physical realm.

But it's one thing where I know I have this thing and my children will have this thing. It is a nice feeling and it also is something where I feel, okay, no matter how bad things get, I'm protesting.

This is something that causes the issues because they're never getting these sats. And that's, I don't know. It makes me feel better about everything. It's nice to see that a lot of the Bitcoiners who we've got on Bitcoin Twitter who are pretty much religious about this stuff, they seem to have a similar view

and that they do have this low time preference. And if I had to put money in one group of people's hands who I know are going to make changes that are going to push things forward and do things right, it would be those people.

So it's pretty exciting to see how these things are gonna change. I think it's gonna be a battle, but I think at the end of the day, we win this citadel theory and the idea of being able to, whatever country you're in.

You know, I think in almost any country now, there are people that I could send a tweet or give a call and say, "Right, I'm here. "Do you wanna go for a drink?" And I've never had that before, but in the Bitcoin community, certainly people everywhere that you can sort of catch up with and learn from and that's pretty cool.

- Yeah, I am totally with you there when it comes to that we are going to build a better world. And we always have, currently we have this backup land if shit should hit the fan. Then we still have the option to get out of there with most of our wealth intact.

And yeah, I see it as you, like things seem to get worse, especially after this pandemic hit. And I believe that if there were not those governments that like we're just using this opportunity to find an excuse to blame the failing monetary system on the pandemic, things would have been much easier, I think.

Like we would have been way more reasonable about this. And in my mind, like currently what's going down doesn't seem to be connected with the virus at all anymore. - No, it didn't ever seem that way from the start, to be honest, it's when it first hit and when these restrictions and things were starting

to come in, the idea that this was a controlled demolition of the economy seemed like the most reasonable bet. But now I think it's more than that. Now I think it's complete control and data collection and blurring the lines of what we have sovereignty over.

Do we have sovereignty over our bodies anymore if we have forced vaccines? How free is our speech if we can't question the science in quotation marks? If we can't speak freely and we can't move freely, is it really a free world?

Is it really a democracy if we can't have choice? Like it is starting to feel very 1984, but without going down that sort of dark road, the thing that gives me hope is this stuff, the thing that gives me hope is Bitcoin.

And I don't know how it plays out, I don't know how long it takes, but I do think that we win. And I think that lightning is something, lightning's something I still haven't spent a huge amount of time with.

I've sent a few payments, I've got a couple of nodes running, I've got a couple of channels out, but I've done a few bits, but I definitely like to delve in more. And with some of the stuff I'm doing with 21ism, we're gonna be implementing it more.

I definitely wanna start with this ring of fire. You guys have talked to me about it, and it sounds like a really, really cool idea. So do you think it's gonna be lightning that is the layer on top of Bitcoin that really makes this transactional and possible?

And do you think there are other benefits with it, like privacy, for example? Are you married to the idea that it's lightning? Are you, are you as sure on lightning as you are on Bitcoin?

Or do you just think it's the best thing we have now? Well, I'm a strong lightning believer to be frank. Like, I think it really makes, can make Bitcoin mainstream. Like, it doesn't even need to be custodial.

Like, for example, I have known my lightning node up and running. I even managed to connect my blue wallet with it, with the possibility that I could just say to my friends and family, hey, if you want, you can have a lightning wallet through me.

Like, of course, you still need to trust somebody else. And I know this whole, don't trust verify paradigm in Bitcoin is important. But yeah, at some point there's, there are going to be some, I'm missing the word right to how the compromises that we have to make.

I mean, we can try to compromise as little as possible. But if you really want to onboard the majority of the world population, then we need second layer scaling solutions. But most, the most sovereign way is lightning, I think.

But of course, you can also trust your bank that they facilitate payments and they guard the money. For you, I still think that banking has a right to exist in an under Bitcoin standard. Like, small commercial banks, not the big central banks that control the money.

And when it comes to lightning, like, that's why I really, I'm really bullish on the Ring of Fire right now because it's not really a way to like earn more routing fees or anything. It's more plebs having a meme under which they can come together to help each other out.

Like, if you're willing to put in some liquidity, you get the same amount of liquidity back, which I think is really cool because it already solves that problem of getting outbound and inbound liquidity.

Like, if you're on your own, all you can do is open channel to others and you only have outbound liquidity, like you cannot receive payments. But if you join the Ring of Fire, immediately you get a multitude of plebs that can help you if you have questions.

Like, you don't even have to have lightning note right now. Like, if you're just starting out, I think we are all willing to just bring you up to speed. So I think it's definitely worth joining the general Ring of Fire group.

And once you're ready and you want to put in some sets on lightning, then we can try to find a ring that you can participate in. We are currently, we are trying to build up to three more new rings.

Like, one is one million Satoshi Ring. Like, everybody puts in one million Satoshi and then there's a five million sets and a 10 million sets for the big boys. But there's already interest in another one million starts ring and a two million starts ring.

So there's like a lot of opportunity to just jump into a ring, even after we close the first ones. And since I tweeted about it and Nonya, he mentioned it in his podcast, a lot of people just flocked into the channel and everybody's so excited to just open the ring.

Like, some people just wanted to open the channel right away without even being organized like this, a lot of eagerness. Like, it just gets started with this thing. It's amazing to see. It's really, really cool.

And the people, they get inspired by, just by the idea of having those rings and making thoughts and how can we make this thing better and what about routing and balancing and how can we just improve this?

It's amazing to see. - It's such a great idea. It's such a good way for onboarding people. And like you're saying, it's a complicated thing. And to be able to have something where people aren't trying to just make money, they're trying to just make the system better, trying to make it so that it's more usable to more people.

And I love that. I think it's brilliant. It's definitely something I'd like to do. Solex really sold me on it. And then a couple of days later, Princey reached out to me. I was like, mate, you've got to get on this rings of fire thing.

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, I'll do that. And so it's definitely taking hold. And it's something that I really like the idea of. So is it something that's open to everyone? Is it like an invite thing?

- I tweeted an invite link on the Twitter thread. But if you just reach out to me, I can invite you as well. - So for listeners, if anyone's listening and saying, you know, I'd like to get into lightning, but I'm not sure I want to make sure that I have inbound and outbound.

And I want to get involved and have a play. The pools you're talking about is what? Did you say one million, 10 million and five million, was it? - Five million. But I think if people are interested in any number of sets, we can probably find people who are thinking the same.

Like there is no upper or lower bound. Okay, I think the lower bound might be the economical barrier to make lightning channel opening feasible. But yeah, anything goes. - And how many do you need to make something like this workable?

And is there an upper bound limit? For example, could you have a thousand people in one of them? Or would that be too many for some reason? Like, I'm not so good with my technical stuff on this.

Is it something that would have a cut off or you'd have to have several of these rings or can they all be connected? - Well, connections between the rings, I think we can be so much interconnected at some point that we don't have rings anymore, but I think that won't happen.

- According, regarding the size of participants, the amount of support participants in one ring, I think the sweet spot might lie around 10 or 12. It's just for coordination purposes. Because ideally we opened the channels all at the same time or around the same time, maybe a weekend.

And if you have a thousand people, I think that probably 10% won't eat more from the channel. So there would be a ring happening. So we have already more interested in the one million Satoshi ring that goes beyond 12.

So we decided, yeah, we are going to just do another one when we find enough people who are interested in that. So I think yeah, around 10 or 12, because then it's also easier to do a balancing transaction because this is something that rings really enable us to do if we all have the same standard size and have a closed ring,

then we can, once the ring is closed, do one balancing transaction. So we didn't do this in the first ring, but I think for the next rings, we were going to do this once the ring is closed.

I, for example, I could build a route that hops through each node of the ring with half of the amount that channel sizes. For example, in the one million Satoshi ring, I would pay myself 500,000 sats.

So when this payment then goes around the ring, it takes the outbound liquidity half of this and pushes it to the other side. So you have a perfectly balanced channel and nobody has to trust anyone to get paid back the money because I just pay myself.

It goes trustlessly through the ring. So I get my money back and everybody has a balanced channel. - That's perfectly balanced. - Very clever. Yeah, I love this idea because one thing that put me off, not put me off, but I sort of didn't put as much interest into lightning was I didn't like this idea of having these hubs,

like huge hubs to everything's being routed through, you know, like async and Ellen Big and all these different things. Now, I sort of thought, I don't like the idea of this. I don't fully understand this.

It's pretty confusing stuff to me. Anyway, but it didn't feel right. It didn't feel like what had been described to me. But what you're describing to me sounds much more that it's using the community and helping each other rather than people trying to collect fees.

And I didn't also like the idea that things have been routed through these single points where I was thinking, well, what if these are then being tracked? Like, I wasn't so sure on the privacy side.

And, you know, even if you put something through Whirlpool and then open a channel, I was a little bit concerned. So I just haven't really used it. Is there any drawback from the way this thing is set up from a privacy perspective or are there any positives or is it just doesn't really matter?

It just means that people have their connectivity. - You mentioned quite a few points. Let me start with competing with bigger nodes 'cause I feel this is often criticized about the lightning network that there are those big hubs that are like lifting up the lightning network.

And if they would disappear, everything would just break down. I don't think so 'cause I think we're sufficiently connected even without those bigger nodes. But yeah, those rings. We talked about this in the beginning already.

They kind of, they seem like an opportunity to compete against them. 'Cause let's say, for example, that a ring, they have zero fees, like amongst each other. And you could consider one ring as one single node, like just decentralized node even.

So it increases the resilience and eliminates the single point of failure. And I think this is what I really like about those rings because yeah, it's the plebs and not some people with all the money that can dictate how the lightning network looks like.

So let's see how this plays out. I'm really curious to see the privacy concerns. Of course, you're gonna connect with people and they know who you are. Like, okay, if you have an M, they know you're in them behind the node.

But I think everything else that the lightning network promises regarding privacy still holds true. We have, however, we're looking currently into sharing some routing data, like how the balances are currently amongst each channel in the ring, and just share it between the participants of each ring.

So we would be all in the node and maybe could act on the data we collect. It could be either manually, like we see, okay, on this side of the ring, it's a bit out of balance. Maybe we structure the fees in a specific way to bring it back into balance or do some rebalancing acts and things like this, or we maybe even optimize it.

Like, this is still a lot to explore. Like, a lot of people are talking about, like, if we could just implement some script that automatically balances the channels by setting specific fees, then nobody would need to worry about keeping their channels balanced.

Maybe this is something that is easier done through the rings, but that remains to be seen. But what I like about the rings, especially, is you put in a little bit of trust but you get so much more out of this because you certainly have people who are watching out for you, like, either checking on your note

if it's still online or I, for example, I now turn my lightning note into a watchtower as well. And I told my peers in the first ring, the address to the watchtower so they can connect to this.

So I'm protecting their channels at the same time. And I expect others to do this as well for the other rings and for me as well. So we, like, we just strengthen the network through incorporating in this strong manner.

I haven't checked out other projects within the lightning. I think there's one, how was it called loop, where many people get together and they share information and helping each other out.

I haven't checked out those because, somehow, I'm a bit intimidated because it seems like those aren't like the savvy guys, the tech savvy guys who are deep into the game. And, yeah, Ring of Fire seems more like a plep approach towards the lightning network.

And now, and now also that it has become so significantly, significantly easier, spinning up a note through Umbral and Raspberry Blitz, my note and so on, like all those. The barrier of entry is incredibly small and it has become incredibly small.

So I think almost anybody can do that who just knows a little bit about the tech and is not intimidated by some of the aspects, like, for example, logging in through SSH to your Raspberry Pi.

- It's definitely become more accessible and there's so many options out there now, which is nice. It's sort of, it seems to be growing at quite some rate and I'm running a few of them. I quite like my Raspberry Blitz at the moment.

That's been pretty decent and there's a lot of flexibility with it. I haven't yet run an Umbral but I hear a lot of people raving about it and my miss is now once a lightning network node.

So I'm thinking maybe to get her running with Umbral and check it out. Have you used one yourself? - No, I'm one of those that try to spin everything from scratch. Like, I just followed a tutorial by Dany and me how to just install everything from scratch but instead of sea lightning, what he recommended, I then switched to L&D

because it seems easier to manage, especially if you want to integrate with some interfaces and other projects. About Umbral, like, it's a really nice way to onboard people who are just starting out who are beginning.

But I already noticed that a lot of people who just want to do a bit more advanced stuff, they start to have problems with Umbral because they abstract a lot of the technical stuff away and in many cases, you cannot even do what you want anymore because you're restricted by their architecture.

Like, for example, Stackmore, he migrated his old node or he intended to migrate to Umbral and there is a way to take over all your channels without closing them. You just go from one hardware to the other but Umbral doesn't allow this.

It's just not possible. So he had to close all his channels and reopen them. - That's annoying. - Yeah, that, of course, it's a lot of, it's that Satsia have to pay for that and yeah, the other problem that Umbral currently has is the licensing issue.

I don't know if you have caught on that. - Is it that they're not allowing, or they're not staying open source, they are closed, is that right? - Well, they are open source but the rights prevent you from modifying the hardware, the hardware, the software, I believe.

So, for example, now with the taproot issue, nobody could just fork the code and then make some changes to, for example, say a lot true or false. So, users who are using Umbral, they have to go with what they say, basically.

- Ah, okay. That's not so great. - Yeah, it's an issue currently and I also noticed because I made one single commit for mempool.space, just like changing the style and mempool.space, they changed the license from, well, it was permissive before, I should think, GPL, A-P-A-T-P-L, but they switched it to another GPL license.

So, some companies, they could integrate it in their structures, like even more permissive, so to speak, but they needed my approval as well. - Oh, wow. - Like, this is how deep it goes. I just made one single commit to fix one tiny style bug but they had to ask for permission from me.

So, I was asked to give my consent that we can change the license. So, changing the license is not trivial, like it requires a lot of coordination from every developer ever contributed to that project.

- Interesting, I didn't know that. Yeah, that maybe makes me rethink it. There's always a trade-off, nothing's ever simple, but yeah, I have to think about it. - And it's the same with Apple products, like it's great for usability, but users are very restricted in their world garden.

- That's absolutely true. That's something I'm moving away from at the moment over to PopOS. - Mm-hmm, yeah, I tried as well, but for work, I'm still using this MacBook that my company provided for me, but for personally, I try also to stick to Linux.

- Yeah, it's, well, once this open source bug and Bitcoin bug gets you, it's just a constant improvement game. It's just, I find every time I make a change, whether it's going from a ledger to a cold card or going from, you know, one of the older wallets over to Samurai or running a node, or whatever it is,

there's always something different you have to change. There's always another step or learning PGP or learning whatever it is. And it's just full on, it's just never changing, but it is nice to have this community and people who can help and support and give advice.

So, look, I've taken an hour and a half of your time. It's been fascinating to hear about everything you've been doing and hearing about the game, which I'm really looking forward to have a go out when it's ready and definitely going to do this Ring of Fire thing.

You've got me thinking about permaculture now. I've, we've been looking at land for some time now. It's sort of my exit strategy is to get some land. I'm going to start. If you can look for land with some permaculture principles in mind already, it definitely gives you an advantage.

I'll be doing some research. And as I get closer, I might have to ask you some questions. But is there anything that we haven't covered or anything that's really exciting you at the moment that you wanted to go through before we wrap things up?

No, I think you're leaving me quite satisfied. Excellent. That is good. To take your podcast, Virginia, and leaves you satisfied is a good thing. I'm very happy to hear that. It's been a great pleasure.

For me too. And if you find yourself in England, if all this stuff finishes and, you know, even if there's not a meetup, do give me a shout. We'll go for a drink or come around. We'll put a barbecue on or something.

It's always good to catch up with people and really enjoy chatting with you. Yeah, definitely. When I'm in a different country and I know that there are some clubs around, I will hit them up.

And if I'm ever in England, I will let you know. 100%. That would be fantastic. All right, well, I'll let you get on with your evening, but I really enjoyed it. And I'll be speaking to you in the background anyway about rings of fire.

Once I get my arcing gear and get myself sorted, I'll be jumping on. Yeah, you're looking forward to seeing the chat. All right. Thanks, mate. Thanks very much. Thank you too. Bye-bye.