Let's talk about the market cap. Let's talk about the market cap off through all of the years of your complaining about Bitcoins yelling one. All the developers were always working on scaling and adding in case I go around corners completely and utterly failed Bitcoin how many more transactions can it do for a second than it used to be able to do it can do a lot with lightning Network and do a lot with segue. It was the last time you don't like, you know, we're transaction in common. I I've never done one by a deuce. I go all the time and I use Bitcoin all day every day. I've never once been a lightning Network. And the amount of difficulty that it is for the entire ecosystem to switch from Bitcoin core to bitcoin cash or a theory more - or Monaro or take your pick is much much much smaller than the amount of effort and resources and retooling that's required for people to switch from taking actions to bitcoin core lightning transactions. It's not going to make that jump anytime soon if ever. This is the lightning junkies podcast with your host to Chaz Crypt of sin on this episode of the podcast. We have John Carvalho Chief Communications officer from bit refill bit refill is a company that offers gift cards prepaid mobile refills and lightning Network Services that you can pay with Bitcoin and lightning Network transactions in this episode. We talk about Bitcoin the lightning Network the circular economy Silk Road and Roger ver the first audio you here on this podcast is the famous Roger ver and John Carvalho interview from the end of 2017. I picked out this bit of audio specifically because he states that the lightning network will never be used in Commerce. Obviously things have changed quite a bit in the last two years and I wanted to really emphasize this before we jumped into this podcast. This is the third episode. Of the lightning junkies podcast and the last in the series is about onboarding newbies to the lightning Network. This podcast has no sponsors. I receive 100% of my funding for this podcast through the crowdfunding link and tipping dot me that you can find in the show notes below. I don't like listening to podcast that have 10 minutes of sponsorship talk and I prefer to jump into the podcast as quickly as possible. So with that here's the interview with John Cavallo. All right, and I'm going to go ahead and welcome John to the lightning junkies podcast. How are you doing tonight? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Absolutely. So I kind of just wanted to start at the typical thing and just kind of get your general Bitcoin background and understand how you got into the space. Sure. I've been in Bitcoin nearly seven years now. I think it would be seven years in a month or so started in late 2012 and you know heard about it like a lot of people around that time because of all Silk Road, dark web kind of news articles that were being published and then once I started digging more into it, you know, I just basically got more and more consumed every day that I learned something about Bitcoin. Did you ever use Silk Road yourself? Yes. I did try it but after going through the experience, you know, your paranoia goes up pretty high and you're like, okay, I should not probably mess around with this kind of thing. Yeah. Definitely I happen to use it as well and I had kind of had the same experience. Did you feel like it established the kind of use case for you? It's like I can use this as my kind of Black Market money and use it in a way that nothing else really could be used in. Well, yeah, I mean, I do think it's a great example, like it's like it shows the use case of slaps you in the face with it. You know, I'm not really like a black market kind of person anyway, but you know when it's presented to you this way and you say okay, like there are actually people, you know on this dark web using this to do very illegal things and You know at the time we're thinking they're getting away with it. This is like obviously there's something going on here. How is this working? What kind of tool do we actually have at our fingertips now and that was what really intrigued me was like, okay. This is this is a way that I can use money and you know be private and in kind of have control, you know, I've always been a somewhat anti-authority kind of person and I just don't like the feeling of losing my freedom or NG at the kind of whim of some powerful Authority, you know, like if you get pulled over by a cop or are dealing with bureaucracy when you're doing paperwork or stuff like this you really start to like feel it, you know that you don't you're not really in total control and then you learned about the banking system and the other things that kind of influence the creation of the coin and you know, you start you start seeing how this can really be a solution to to maybe correct some of the things of how money works on our economy kind of currently. Okay? Definitely. So you said that Around late 2012 you kind of got into that. How did it go from there? Oh from you know, just like most people you know, like this is like if you look at my Twitter, you see that like, I'm very emphatic or overconfidence sometimes about my opinions on things but part of that comes from my personality but a bigger part just comes from experience, you know, all these cycles that have come people did all this stuff before, you know, ico's. We're not the first time there were a lot of people trying to get a lot of Bitcoin. Investment from people in Bitcoin, you know in 2013 you had a lot of people trying to raise money for what they were doing is like IPOs and we had like Securities platforms that were, you know, they weren't tokenized but you could still you know, take part and get shares on a central database on different projects and there were some scams there were some Ponzi schemes and you know mining contract operations and things like this and the in even back then and it kind of served as a template for all the iterations. Is of of scammers / kind of fundraising that we saw afterwards. So yeah, I basically after I got into it and learned about the Silk Road stuff. I started like playing around with mining started playing around with trading, you know, started hanging out with talking to developers in IRC and other people and you know, the Bitcoin talk forums were really popular back then and read it was was more usable back then for Bitcoin. And so you just kind of go deeper and deeper you start to get get to know different people you start trying to learn more about finance and economics and you know, all of the things that maybe your current career didn't have much to do with and and you have to kind of immerse yourself in all of these disciplines to even understand Bitcoin in the first place a definitely I feel like I kind of learned a lot since that period of time but you mentioned Reddit, you know, and a big kind of event in the history of Bitcoin. I mean on some level I guess is the the split between Our Bitcoin in rbtc and that's going to give me a kind of a segue here to kind of mention the Roger ver interview because he was you know, the, you know, one of the moderators of rbtc and his kind of rhetoric over there. How did that interview end up coming about? Yeah. It was during the heat of the whole you ASF and New York agreement and bip 148 and Bitcoin cash. It was you know, right during the heat of all that and I I was pretty you know, active and vocal in that little war, you know for Bitcoins Independence as we refer to it now and I had met Roger at associate round table maybe a year before and we had maybe a casual conversation, you know, nothing antagonistic in any way and there was something that I had messaged him about on Twitter privately as a follow-up after I talk to him and so we had like an established communication that way but I hadn't talked to him and maybe a year or more. And then once I saw what was going on with Bitcoin cash, I just sent him another Twitter message after a long time is it? Hey you want to do an interview about the coin cash? And he said yes, and that was really the whole extent of setting up the interview. There was no you no pretense. There was no a lot of people think I was trying to like set him up. But all I did for Preparation was I researched his most recent interviews and you know got to learn what his party lines were and made sure I was prepared to answer them got it and you know, I took the time to watch the Of you today, just I kind of have a bit of background on that and I remember from back then that when the kind of be cash name came up. I came up very organically like I was my girlfriend at the time and I kind of liked the name. It was a very kind of interesting name for a Bitcoin cash Bitcoin Kasia so clunky. So I always found that part of the interview to be really annoying that he took it very personally and had all these nonsense around it during the interview the atopic Going to turn to the lightning Network and he said something along the lines of is lightning being used for Commerce right now. And this was in late 2017. So obviously it really wasn't quite yet. I don't think lightning had hit mean that quite yet. So obviously there has been a quite a change in you know, how much the lightning network has been used since then if Roger were to ask you that same question. Now, what would you tell him? Well, I would say well look at the company I work for right now. I work at bit refill. And we're like literally using lightning for Commerce everyday. It's not the largest payment method, you know Bitcoin on the main net still is but we were using it and we know we're deep into it. We're providing products and services directly related to it. So I think it would be absurd to say it's not used for Commerce in the literal, you know direct sense, but I think what Rogers getting at when he says that it's just talking about adoption, you know, Rogers, you know core kind of desire for everything. Do with crypto is like Mass adoption. He just wants everybody to have it at any cost seemingly. So, you know, I look at it a little bit differently. I would say lightning is not used for Commerce in that broad sense. It hasn't received like a really great product Market fit and seeing a lot of volume and you know people using it everywhere at stores and things like this, but I do think it is the technology best suited for that purpose. You know, I think lightning solves a lot of problems. That we have right now with Bitcoin related to Merchants and consumers in a Commerce environment, you know things like being able to do exact in voice saying and I know instant quote unquote settlement the instantaneousness of the transactions just itself is a very, you know, unique transaction quality that we haven't had before and really a lot of Commerce hasn't had before even with centralized payments. So I think that you know when he brings that Peachy was trying to contrast that that Bitcoin cash would be able to be that solution and he saw the scaling with large box is a way to be able to facilitate really fast really cheap transactions, but I disagree and I think you know most probably listeners on the show and most bitcoiners disagree because obviously even though the blocks are bigger. Nobody is using Bitcoin cash, you know, we're probably seeing more actual Commerce on Lightning at this point. Yeah, I would definitely agree. I mean, when's the last What time you saw a Bitcoin cash product that was you know, taking on large amounts of customers and getting a huge amount of news. I'm not aware of anything. Yeah, I admittedly I've kind of fallen out of the loop. I'm a lot less interested in keeping track of, you know, the communities and antics of altcoins these days too busy doing actual work, but you know, I think that's true. I think that you know, big on cash isn't really going anywhere and the real only kind of use case for all coins at this point. Is them being a For means of you know transporting your crypto value if you are already using a exchange where you have Bitcoin on you know, yeah definitely so would you say that the narrative he was exposing and that video is shown to be kind of nonsense by now is absolutely clear. I mean, it was already clear back then I'm sure but I mean, is it even more clear? Yeah. I mean, I think that was the main message of that video right like that that that Roger ver is nonsense, you know, he's nonsense manifested and and You know, he, you know going back to you saying you thought be cash was a nice name. Well, that's what I said. You know I said, I literally quote you know, it's a nice name and I really did believe that I wasn't really trying to troll him. But you know, he took issue with that point because he won he wanted a way to exit the interview is kind of an excuse and and to it was literally, you know going at the core of his deception which was to exploit the Bitcoin name and I was literally losing Removing Bitcoin the word Bitcoin from his plan and that's probably why it was hitting a sore spot. Do you see Roger as being kind of genuine or do you see him just being dishonest at the core? I used to believe that he was totally, you know dishonest totally deceptive lying and I used to think he was also ignorant but as I've come to kind of see his persistence and see his dedication to the the kind of Bitcoin.com model and and all of the projects that he's trying the everything he's doing to try to make this float, even though it's still not working and also some of the perspectives I've gained by working at bit refill. I will say I actually believe more and more that he's sincere that he actually believes what he says and that the the kind of discrepancy or the distance that we see is that he's willing to to be Is in order to get his end result that he desires because I think he just thinks he's right and he says he thinks the ends will just justify the means got it. Okay, so I kind of want to move away from Roger that's enough Roger talk for now. Yeah, me too, you know touching back onto the lightning Network. You were kind of mentioning that you don't feel like the whole Commerce pieces really intact and in the way that maybe that he was thinking of what do you think is the strongest you Has case right now is it you know things like bit refill and you know other kind of services like that. I mean depends what you mean by strongest use case if you mean like use case that people are actually using it for at this moment. Yeah, I guess I mean you can use it for a lot of people are mostly using it to test to make sure that it works to see how it works and experiment with it even even the business is implementing and that's a huge part of what we're doing. We're just learning it and seeing how to incorporate. Into our production as far as like the use case of where I see it's more about like what I talked about earlier. Like I think that once once business is like bit refill are fully on board and our customers are getting more used to it. We start, you know, making Partnerships with other say exchanges or ATM companies kind of integrate things like our own products and our own catalog or just in general getting infrastructure like exchanges or ATM. Yes, or other point of sale kind of Technologies to incorporate lightning. That's when I think it will really start to like be embedded and habits real shot at getting more adoption and taking a bigger chunk of you know, the Bitcoin transaction volume that's used for Commerce. Do you have a favorite lightning app or service currently, I mean something but bit refill sure I've played I've played with a lot of them but you know in the end the use case of gift cards is actually they're like I heard of bit reso because I needed a gift card for in crypto, you know, and so the use case is real and being able to do that with lightning, you know, you get your code instantly from bit refill. So it's like a total instant experience outside of the banking system, you know you pay with lightning. Yeah, you actually get a small discount 2 percent discount when you pay with lightning and you get your code instantly and you can do what you were trying to do whether it be buying a game or shopping online or you know sending a gift card. Buddy else on my end. I have this kind of thought of trying to onboard newbies directly onto lightning skipping over the base chain of Bitcoin. Try to give them a stronger experience. Do you have any kind of opinion on doing things that way? Yeah, I do. I've kind of tweeted in the past where I said, you know make every Bitcoin transaction a lightning Channel or make somebody's first Bitcoin a lightning that coin or a Bitcoin or SATs on Lightning. It is an interesting way to frame. It an interesting way to approach the problem. I think it's probably partly mostly thought about that way, you know right now for maybe lightning wallet providers because they're the ones trying to figure out what the user experience really needs to be like to get you know adoption of their own product. So you see some good some good tests happening there. Like, for example, I think Breeze will open a channel for you automatically as soon as you install so, you know, they're spending a little bit on their front end on their own end to be able to make That experience easier because you know, when you install most lightning wallets, you're not necessarily going to have even a connection to lightning if you're running a custodial wallet will then you had your in a different Paradigm security wise and you're trusting your wallet provider. So there are a lot of different ways people are trying to make it easy for a first-timer and I think they're all worth doing in there all you know, it's good to have the full spectrum there and see what people actually want. What would you say is the kind of weakest part of maybe the ux of the Lightning Network or is using it all together. It depends on what level you want to talk about. You know, I would say like the weakest part structurally is probably going to be liquidity management, you know, when I mentioned earlier something like getting out exchanges on board. Well exchanges are doing much larger transactions in the current Channel size limit now that you can bust the current Channel size limit if you want to in custom customize your implementation, it's really not that difficult, but you still have to have other people on the network with the same size. Channels to pass your liquidity through for it to actually be worth it or you have to have like newer Technologies for you know multipath routing to be able to do larger, you know sends so it's not quite there yet for for that kind of situation. So that that's a limitation as far as the user experience kind of side. I would say I guess it's just it's just that it's still early, you know, people are still trying to figure out how to present it to people and and while it's what is it? Good side to it. The lightning Community is very fragmented projectwise. So there's a lot of people spread out trying to do their own thing. There's a good side to that where where you're going to have a lot of varied experiments, but there's a bad side where the you don't have like a lot of resources put into you know, one thing where there's a comprehensive, you know kind of approach to making sure that we're doing the best ux I think part of the endgame might be having a paradigm where Just works, you know where if I have a wallet where I can scan any Bitcoin address, you know QR code or lightning QR code and my wallet just pays it and any kind of like, you know Network hopping or exchanging just kind of happens automatically and I just have to approve if there's any fees involved, you know, it has to be kind of a seamless experience. So removing every tap moving every click moving every window that we can to just get the customer from being able to move there too, you know. Know where they want to send their money and send it or the same with receiving receiving gotta kind of moving on I guess. How did you start at bit refill? Basically last winter? I was I had been running my own startup for a while here in Romania, and I was at the point where I had to decide whether to kind of double down and start raising money or because I was living on bitcoin at the at that point and the price had dropped a lot and I thought okay I either need To you know, turn this into a much bigger project and not a pet project and start getting some real investment money in here or I need to stop spending Bitcoin and just get a job. And so I had already been preaching myself to you know on social media that people should be figuring out earning Bitcoin and not and not trading and doing things like that. So I thought I would, you know, put my money where my mouth is and go ahead and and put some feelers out and I made a joke tweet. You know that I mean, that's the the is this a butterfly and it's the anime meme I had tweeted out, you know, is this a job with it with a Twitter logo and Sergey from bit refill got the hint and he's like are you actually looking for a job and I said maybe and we got on a call and we started talking and you know, I think initially he had heard of me because of Twitter and and was may be interested in having some social media help but it turns out a lot of my background is in marketing and I've been in Point for a long time so I had a lot more to add and so I ended up, you know taking a position as the communications officer here and overseeing most of the marketing PR event related stuff and and also hoping a bit with the product and some business development on the lightning side etcetera. And so that's how I ended up at bit refill. Absolutely. Do you want to just give a quick little synopsis that would actual bit refill does for the listeners that may that may not know sure in the grand sense, but Refill is trying to build help build out a circular economy for Bitcoin, you know, and the way that we've done that so far is by kind of frightening three arms of service which are gift cards so you can be able to spend your Bitcoin on you know, pretty much anything depending on the country. We've got, you know dozens of gift cards specifically available for your area. We also provide mobile refills and that's kind of how the company started in the bread and butter so you can be able to top up Phone in many many countries in the world and then the more recent kind of armor service that we're doing is is like kind of like lightning network provider services or it's sort of like an internet service provider and we're providing, you know the ability for Google to custom by channels for liquidity to be able to pay to any endpoint for a lightning invoice. And we also have a unique sort of Pack 2 channels where you can not have to wait for for spending. I have to wait for confirmations called turbo channels. So these are our four products. We have four channels Thor turbo channels and recharge and then we've also recently added an API for our thirst or services to try to help any of these other platforms that are trying to create a seamless experience be able to have some backup services so that they need more liquidity if they need to be able to automate any sort of Channel purchasing or opening that we have these services available for them as an opportunity. Into bacon to their interfaces, would you say the the kind of lightning services are a smaller part of your overall business Revenue wise I would say in in volume as far as sales. It's smaller compared to the other things that were selling as far as our research and our development work put into it. It's is larger in proportion. It's also good to keep in mind even though it's a small part of our Revenue compared to gift cards. We're doing probably more revenue and Enlightening than any other lightning company, I would guess it's still a small Network overall, but we are you know doing our best to make sure we find the best ways to capitalize on it. Are there any other lightning Services coming down the pipe here? I mean, yeah, nothing I can reveal here that's coming in the short term, but we are always thinking about what our next strategy is for lightning. I think right now one thing we're trying to do is we're trying to do some kind of ground work with talking to other. Two serpents in the network to kind of make sure we set up some of these liquidity channels and set up some of these companies making sure they integrate so we're working on trying to set up Partnerships with companies to integrate bit refill. And in that process, you know, making sure that we're helping them with by providing, you know, supplementary lightning services or giving them monetization use cases for their platform through embedding the bit refill catalog of gift cards and things like this and and in that process we're trying to you know build up. The lightning Network and get more people to accept lightning pushing exchanges to you know, incorporate it faster and letting them know that there are you know, supplementary services available. So I think that's one thing to keep an eye out for in the coming months is you know, more serious attention from exchanges and more Partnerships definitely looking forward to that part of the marketing that I see for. The refill is the idea of living on bitcoin Etc. Is there anything like missing from the bit refill service that would really allow someone? A live off Bitcoin totally it's kind of a question. We're asking ourselves in our customers right now in the process of doing some internal research on the ways that our customers use our service the the the software they use like the wallets they use to use our service Etc. So we're trying to figure that out in the end. What we're trying to do is build is like I said build out a circular economy. You mentioned living on crypto. That's pretty much what that means and you know the means of Building a circular economy are Building Services for earning spending or services that help people learn in spend. And so that's that's where our kind of focus areas that make sense. Absolutely. So jumping into the circular or closed-loop economy thing recently. I went to the Bitcoin 2019 conference and while I was in San Francisco, I you know went to some marijuana dispensaries and I kind of chatted up the the people that were there about Bitcoin because like I can't help myself and I asked them. What was the biggest stop? Point from them really being able to you know, use Bitcoin accept Bitcoin and they said that they can't pay for their vendors in Bitcoin and you know that kind of made me realize that if you could somehow get the vendors and the vendors of the vendors to you know, use Bitcoin that you could essentially create a closed loop economy, you know in the marijuana shops stuff like that. Do you think places like that or and you know the places where it more is most likely to be able to get some start there. And I think that's accurate that business-to-business payment is a huge gap right now in the circular economy. Unfortunately, like for bit refill, you know, we have to be careful which path we choose and helping build this thing out because there's a path where you end up becoming a payment processor and money transmitter and having to do all kinds of kyc a mouse stuff and I feel like we kind of have enough people on that path. We have enough businesses focusing on Total compliance, you know and that's kind of a little more the area where the business-to-business payments probably needs to start, you know, or like for example, if I want to pay for an advertising, you know Bill from bit refill and Bitcoin the the receiving company is probably going to end up if they don't accept Bitcoin directly. They're going to look at somebody like bitpay or another payment processor to be able to do it. But pay is definitely not ideal and it's not working out in that regard for a lot of businesses. So there There's that there's probably some room for somebody to step in and kind of Grease the wheel to make businesses be able to pay other businesses better. But yeah, it's a gap and and I'm just not sure if it was going to be the one to fill it unless lightning can be a solution where we can do this in a way that is not as a money transmitter got it. So you can kind of mentioned bitpay so might as well jump into that really fast. Do you think something with you know, BTC pay server and there, you know they Something called transmuter. Do you think something like that might you know serve that that a company might have a self-hosted BTC pay server and a wave to kind of offload their Bitcoin, unfortunately, because I think the reality is they're mainly staying in Fiat do think there's anything you know to work with her. Yeah. I actually I think be TCP participate server is a great project. It's interesting project and I'm really interested to see how it grows out with like How many other types of services it will incorporate within its distribution, you know, like if they'll start directly incorporating some like kind of tertiary things and and how big it grows and how useful of a platform it becomes more than just being able to accept Bitcoin. Yes, the the offloading into fee our being able to sell automatically is kind of one of the solutions they want but keep in mind if we're talking about a circular economy. We're not necessarily. King for them to want to exchange it a more I am more interesting ideal is if lightning is instant, then that means that you're only really pricing things for the moment and the volatility risk is much much lower. Everything is just continually flowing and so if we can get, you know, the customer paying enlightening to the business the business paying for whatever that resource was. Dynamically if you know via API or whatever with With the business they're sourcing it from with that business being able to instantly pay towards bills for you know, the resources they needed to buy to create that product and then paying their employees and if everything starts becoming more flow more streaming as a payment process the volatility starts mattering a lot less if that makes sense. Absolutely. You kind of mention the streaming money there and I think the way that I first initially got interested in the lightning network is And Andreas talked about you know streaming money. Like I think in 2016 if I'm remembering correctly. When did you first started getting interested in lightning? If you can remember the I first started getting lightning probably I mean I was interested in it ever since I heard of it, you know, it's just how when did I start getting seriously interested? I mean much more when I joined bit refill, but you know just before that as well, you know, I was the project I was doing before this was a live video streaming platform and you know when we We know we adopted segment very early and then we were you know, we knew that lightning was coming and we were trying we were thinking about ways that we could creatively integrate lightning into it, but I never got to that point with the project ended up moving onto bit refill. So it was always definitely an interesting thing. I remember like, you know, even before bit refill looking at some of the work that roast beef was I think doing for for who's calling each Chelsea - for streaming video for payments and so we're like, this could be really cool. So I I've been paying attention to it ever since it was mentioned years ago, but it's just mostly increased in the past year or two. So if I may ask about your previous project sure the previous projects that was doing was called Exotica TV. It was an adult video chat platform. So models could live stream adult content and members could be able to pay without having to give private information you the credit card information using using Shady pay processor cetera, and you could even use the you know pay without even having account the website would automatically generate sort of a cookie account for you that you could deposit into and spend that way the problem with that with that platform ended up being and I think that you know, we see some competitors and other coins like spank chain 2 and similar things the problem is that the problem wasn't necessarily just getting that industry to understand Bitcoin or be interested in earning in Bitcoin or that that was a relatively solvable relatively Something that you could you could accomplish, you know and get at least a good enough market share to continue as a business. The real problem is you actually need to do a business like that a significant scale to be able to compete and have anybody even take you seriously which means you need a large team to be able to compete with these these Legacy platforms that have been building out feature sets for decades. And so you can't just walk into this this video streaming Market with a kind of bare bones platform and say okay come use us. You can earn Bitcoin you have to come in there and you have to have a competitive product as well. Absolutely. Would you say that the you know large Legacy competitors were ripping off the models by overcharging, you know, they're cut or whatever. Now, this is an argument IV Emily disagree with you know, this is this is this is something that Spain Shane came in is as part of their pitch for the purpose of their platform being to cut out evil middlemen. I don't believe that that's how things work the market for for the adult industry is been around for a long time, you know. It's had a lot of time to like find where the efficiencies are. And the reasons why people take the fees that they take are because they're providing services that are worth those fees. Otherwise, it's not like a monopoly kind of exploitative situation. It's that you know, there's money to be made and there's people in the middle that you have to pay to be able to make that money flow payment processors in in the adult industry charge so much because they have to deal with so much more chargebacks and and this this chargeback issue has kind of been obfuscated away from users. They think that it's it's gone, but it's not gone. It's just been baked into the price now and so they see this as like predatory and they see that they label these parent processes or Shady. Sometimes they get shut down but it's similar to the Bitcoin industry where like, you know, you'll have a Bitcoin startup and they'll lose their banking. It's the same thing when you're dealing with adult industry stuff. So between all the chargebacks, And you know it being a somewhat taboo areas business. There's more volatility and is more cost into into providing and making money flow in that in that economy. So, I don't think that that was really the real thing the real interest for these people is being able to have control of their money being able to have privacy less custody situation. So less opportunity to lose your money if somebody does closed down and it's things like that. Yeah with lightning you can start adding efficiency things, but this is like high-tech and there that industry so far, you know, even though the adult industry has been known for being the first to incorporate certain Tech. They usually more known for that in the sense of like providing new entertainment or new, you know, Dimension to the entertainment not necessarily to do with efficiency of payment structures. So I think once maybe there's it's easy to like spin up a streaming video. Shin of one too many using lightning then you can you'll see some video projects that will adopt it. But right now, you know, that's not like the priority for the normal lightning community and it like I said to do a project like that without it being more than a science experiment. You actually need a good scale. You need a good budget, you know, you millions and millions of dollars to be able to create a platform and survive for a few years and be able to promote that product platform really hard into that industry. Tree to make them understand what the costs and benefits are compared to what they're already using. Okay, that's very interesting. I'd you know, I guess you kind of school be there a little bit. So would you say that there is any businesses out there that are kind of low hanging fruit that maybe you know aren't adopting Bitcoin but easily could adopt Bitcoin and find a lot of you know advantages. Um, I don't know that they're they're losing out because the people that use Bitcoin other people that need Bitcoin I'm talking about not just like Talking about investing or trading or speculating like talk about you know users that use it as an alternative because it provides advantages that normal banking doesn't or whether unbanked or they restricted by you know jurisdiction for in various ways. And I barely feel like I get a good peek into this because we see which products are the most popular with certain countries and things like this and we hear stories about how bit refill allows them to do things that they couldn't do otherwise, so there's there's definitely use for it out there. As far as if any of the companies, you know the companies that that people like to do the most for the crypto are the things that provide the most utility, you know, so like for example every crypto company and the gift card space or even remotely connected to it is trying to make sure they can sell Amazon gift cards and iTunes gift cards because these are things that a lot of people want they can be used for a lot of different purposes. And so they have high utility so bitcoiners that that need to live on crypto in any way or Come some kind of unbanked circumstance. They're looking for utility looking for the thing that they can do the most with their crypto a big Trend that I'm seeing in lightning and I guess in the Bitcoin world to generally is the idea of earning like you were saying earlier, you know, you wanted to earn Bitcoin not just, you know, spend it or trade Etc. Do you see this taking up more so for different companies because you know, we have we have call said with their you know SATs back program. Do you see that? Kind of growing over time and becoming more popular as a way to onboard new users. Um, I think we need to split the conversation into you know, when I want to when I want to discuss learning in and I want to I want to discuss earning in the context of like the circular economy for Bitcoin and people when they're doing work performing tasks, you know getting paid that's earning using giving away and doing Kickbacks and rewards as part of your platform is not earning in my opinion. This is this is a Is a method of marketing and it's not like an isn't there's nothing wrong with it per se but it's not a business model. It's not all it is is just a way to generate attention you're paying for traffic. So it's just a normal marketing method. So I think in that realm like with SATs back with Kickbacks with rewards, you'll see a lot of people adopting this even will end up having a reward program at some point. And we also, you know launched our refer-a-friend program last week, but this is not her. And to me earn is like one of the other, you know, kind of pillars of a circular economy and and there are people working on this enlightening you have this paid app. I don't know if you looked at that but it's a in beta on iOS, I believe and these are places where you can list jobs and lists tasks. We microtasks small things that you can make a small amount of sets doing very quickly. Earn has been a concept in in Bitcoin for the same reasons even Years now with our in.com and coinbase, you know buying or.com and incorporating into that their platform but coinbase turned that concept away from the getting paid and doing work into more of the marketing side because now they're like, they're paying you to learn about the things that they sell you know, so it's a little bit more of a marketing trick in that in that context. Okay, that's very interesting that you kind of, you know, put it that way. I didn't expect that. Do you think you could pay Paint a picture of the future of lightning. I mean, I guess we could already win to that a little bit. But I mean, do you have any specific views on things you expect in the future or things? Maybe they're you'd want to see in the future. I mean, what I want to see is I'd like to see late and getting adopted at its own pace. But you know like that that is constant and upward that is not totally dependent on bitcoin doing the same, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen right away. It looks like you know, my Outlook would be I talked a lot about various. Outlook things in other answers, but you know my Outlook is generally I think we need to keep building it out. Would he need to keep making it better easier to use more utility more connectivity across the the whole, you know, economic infrastructure of Bitcoin and then we need to make sure we're damn ready when when blocks are full and and everything is pumping and everybody is wanting to move a lot of Bitcoin around that where that that this time we're going to say. Yeah, the fees are high, but that's why you're supposed to use lightning for this, you know. That's why you can you know use this wallet and you can you know, Lightning Charge your Bitcoin or whatever kind of marketing method you want to do to deliver this to people and let them know that the this is how you use Bitcoin when you need to do this thing. And so and as I'll be ready and them not like take it as a joke when we try to you know, convert them onto lightning when they looking for high frequency low cost payments. Okay, you know since we have lightning and all that do you think that's going to be the all that will need or do you think one? A that the blocks will have to be or the block size will have to be raised in order to incorporate, you know, x amount of users or do you think Lightnings enough raising the block size? I don't think is necessarily an answer. I suppose it's possible, you know, if we want the soft work other methods like we did with secwet Segway it to kind of, you know, inject block size in through the side then then we'll do it if necessary. I don't ever foresee an actual hard Fork to do such a thing. But and to answer your question is do I think lightning is the end-all be-all solution? Not really. I think it could be if it had to be it would probably be enough at least for you know, some notable amount of time of Bitcoins life, but there's already you know, there's always going to be an already is Research into other ways of scaling Bitcoin sideways, you know, you're talking about side chains you were even talking about layer 3, like layer 3 is already a constant conversation. Station in my life when talking about lightning, you know, because we're we're involved in helping with the Spectrum project, which is a kind of umbrella underneath the umbrella of the RGB project which is an effort to make, you know, tokenized assets both fungible and and non fungible tokens. So something that is easy to do and practical within the Bitcoin Network context which is something that coin is never really had truly, but you see liquid in the side. Jane and you see them trying to do that and scaling as an alternative, you know, so there we're going to have more than one option and hopefully, you know the options we need when we need them. We'll be there. I personally I'm more trying to focus on Lightning because I see lightning as more of a longer term and more like kind of public good layer and network because it's kind of you know, anyone can do it. No, no special party is running it organizing it or trusted, you know to be able to Do it and it will probably be there for a long time. So I would rather build on that and see what we can build on that but you know layer 3 is going to be a concept, you know, you're going to see people starting to frame the lightning Network as you know, this is just a monetized peer-to-peer Network. And you know, if you want to be crazy you can just think from how do we just put the whole internet on this? That's an extreme. But if you come from that way of thinking you start being able to be creative about what kinds of services you can actually You know piggyback onto a lightning Network. Yeah, I've definitely heard of spectrum and I've heard it kind of described as a way to scale lightning even more because you can you know office Kate even more of the you know, underlying stuff on Lightning. I think it's very interesting. Do you see lightning being a a privacy tool and a way to kind of protect people on some level I mean coins are very popular Wasabi and Samurai are very popular. But do you see lightning being a kind of Editor in that sense. I do not I don't think that this competition for privacy on bitcoin or any layer of Bitcoin. I see them as like a toolset where if you know how to use all the tools and and you do use all the tools appropriately you can achieve good enough privacy, you know, I am not a believer of putting privacy on the base layer of Bitcoin. I think actually think as a blockchain it is more valuable with you know, A more direct transparency as a model and I would rather see privacy aspects put into coin joining schemes other layers side chains and there be a I'd rather see there be a process for what you have to do in order to achieve good enough privacy, then try to pretend that we need to force everybody onto it. What would you say is your biggest worry about the future of Bitcoin / lightning my biggest worry probably whenever I think about anything to do with Bitcoin, it's like we're always You know, there's a risk here and we're always trying to kind of predict and were always trying to use our models of understanding for for taking comfort. And in that this isn't too risky and that we're doing the right thing. So my biggest concern is always time. It's always, you know, when people say Bitcoin is is inevitably going to do this. Well, I want to say Well, when do you mean like am I going to be dead when it happens, you know, like or is this something that I can like influence and make happen faster? And that's the context I try to put things. Into often with both lightning and Bitcoin in general is you know, is this something is this an inevitability that we can accelerate or is this something where it's kind of not high priority and we're going to have to get to it when it becomes more relevant because we don't even know when when the hell it's going to be relevant. So let's focus on on the low-hanging fruit. Is there a point where you would know that Bitcoin is done for is there any like a signal or sign that you would know is like oh Bitcoins done. I have to move on to something else. I mean, I think Bitcoin will tell us when it's done. You know, it'll just be that's the way it is if that's what happens. It's going to be because too much value has migrated to another you know money and and people have lost too much money and there's just not enough incentive for people to stick around, you know, so Bitcoins dead when when no one's minding it no one's buying it and no one's accepting it and I don't think that's a realistic possible future. Sure, at least I want to say not within my lifetime but I suppose there are catastrophic things that could happen in my lifetime, but certainly not in the short term. I think you know, we got another good, you know, two or three having's before we're going to worry about any catastrophic failure that coin in any way in the same sense. Do you see the mass of adoption of Bitcoin happening in your lifetime? No, I'm not a proponent of mass adoption as a concept. I'm more interested in making sure that Bitcoin is the most useful tool for what it is. As a store of value that's extremely portable and and you know censorship resistant. I'd more like to make sure that it does its purpose for the people that need it that it's you know, that it's a hammer for people who need to bang Nails then making sure then putting a hammer in every home. It's not my it's not my interest. I'm not here to Market Bitcoins of people in that way. I do like education and I do like spreading the word about Bitcoin. So people know what it is and there's No, excess ignorance out there, but I see no no reason to force people or coerce people to move on to bitcoin. I just think that if it is if the design is true and it does what we think it's going to do there will be plenty of migration of value into this money into this network and we won't need to worry about you know, oh my God, the whole world hasn't adopted it yet or only 30% of the world uses it I mean, you know, we're still very very very small and The so plenty of room to grow before we should start worrying about things like Mass adoption. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. What do you think? You know who are the people that need Bitcoin the most right now anyone that is under duress of an oppressive money. I guess just riffing on that answer but it's basically, you know, people whose money is being heavily inflated people whose money is heavily regulated where they can barely move it or they can only move it very limited amounts. So, You know Bitcoin was made to break rules, you know, it's meant to be an alternative to The Current financial system. And so anybody who needs an alternative. That's who Bitcoin is for. Absolutely. Alright, so that's pretty much the end of what I had on my end. Did you want to go ahead and let me know about all the you know links to Twitter and things like that sure you can follow a bit refill a bit refill on Twitter. We recently have added a telegram room also, so if you want to you know hang out, Chat with us if you have questions or feedback, it's somewhere you can access a lot of our team. We have a bit refill.com. If you want to check out our Thor services for the lightning stuff. It's been refilled.com / Thor and you can find me. I'm known as Bitcoin error log in social media so you can find me a Bitcoin error log on Telegram and Twitter as well. All right, John. I really appreciate you a joining me on the lightning junkies podcast. Thanks for having me man. The third episode of the the lightning junkies podcast is in the can what did you think? I definitely learned something from this particular podcast several of those answers from John were pretty unexpected. And I know I'm going to have to re-evaluate some of my thoughts on some things here, which is great. If you found the podcast useful or you learn something I would highly encourage you to subscribe on whatever podcast platform that you happen to use and to leave a review if possible as mentioned earlier in this episode this pod. Has to has no sponsors. So if you felt like you took something away from this podcast, I'd highly encourage you to chip in to my crowdfunding campaign or my tipping dot me both links are available in the show notes beyond that. I have decided to make this podcast a weekly podcast with a regular release on Monday. I have a couple good guest coming down the pipe. So please check those out. And once again, please subscribe if this is the kind of content you'd like to hear until next. At time, I'll see you on the lightning Network.
Third episode of the Lightning Junkies Podcast. In this episode, I interview John Carvalho from Bitrefill. Bitrefill is an e-commerce platform that allows users to purchase gift cards, prepaid phone refills, and Lightning Network services. Users can pay for these products/services using Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. In this episode we explore:   John's Background  Silk Road   John's Interview with Roger Ver from 2017   Closed Loop Economies   Privacy of the Lightning Network   Bitrefill   Webcam Industry  John's Twitter: https://twitter.com/BitcoinErrorLog Bitrefill's Twitter: https://twitter.com/bitrefill Bitrefill's Website: https://bitrefill.com/  Bitrefill's Lightning Network Services: https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/usa/lightning/ Sponsor the podcast with Bitcoin on-chain or over the Lightning Network: http://crowdfund.lightningjunkies.net Tip me on Tippin.me: https://tippin.me/@LNJunkies Tip me on Bottle.li: https://Pay.Bottle.li If you wish to contribute in fiat, you can use the Anchor.fm subscription feature. 