This is lightning junkies podcast with your host Chaz crypto set on this week's episode we have well O'Byrne best known for the jewel. Lightning wallet jewel is a great browser extension that allows you to utilize your own lightning node as I mentioned in the episode. I probably use Jewel more thanMost any other wallet that I have a very rarely used my mobile wallets and only use them when I'm out and about or I'm at a place that actually accepts Bitcoin or Bitcoin over lightning. It seems like most of the good use cases for lightning or still on the web and aren't really on mobile quite yet or at least aren't in a place where they're actually easier to use than the web. Just wanted to give a quick shout-out fold here. They're not sponsoring the podcast or anything like that. I just wanted to to give them a quick shout-out and to let you know that if you want to quickly purchase Amazon gift cards or Uber gift cards Etc and be able to save money on top of it. You can definitely do that with fold. There are also on mobile and such. Once again, this is not a sponsorship and fold has not contacted me in any way about talking about them on the podcast. Did you know what it cost $100 a month for me to run this podcast if you would like to chip in any Bitcoin or bit? Wayne over lightning to help me pay for these podcasts costs you can do so by going to crowdfund lightning junkies dotnet and chip in as much as you think the show deserves you can chip in once at or you can chip in a million. It's up to you. My goal is to provide content that is worthy of that 1 million set chip in so hopefully we'll get there this episode. Let's go ahead and jump in I would like to go ahead and welcome will to the lightning junkies podcast. How are you doing this evening? It has super stoked to be here really love what you're doing with the show and just happy to be VIP guests. I'm really glad the final have you on here. You're definitely one of the first people ever one to have you on here. I kind of look up to you and I kind of Dev sort of way like you're doing all these different things and you're very useful to the entire. Assistant well, I appreciate it and I'm totally flattered. I don't know if I can live up to that height, but I'll do my best. Well, that's a little here. Let's go ahead and jump in. I know that you have a bit of a unique starting point. Then a lot of my previous guests have been if I'm correct previous to you making Jewel the Chrome extension. You actually came from aetherium. Is that right? Yeah. So I was working on I started working on it was my ether wallet, but then that kind of turned into my crypto, but it was basically basically the main use or the main way people would like by ico's and and get in on those because it was a wallet that had no opinions really it was just like it would handle any ERC 20 token. I had gotten into a theory. Mm sometime in like late 2016 early 2017 and was just looking around for open source projects to contribute to and that was kind of the peak one that intersect with my skills. So after contributing for It they brought me on to work on it. Okay, and was was your entrance into aetherium the main entrance into crypto overall? Yeah, for sure. So my brother James Coburn who you maybe have heard his name. He's a core developer chain code Labs. He had been talking about Bitcoin for a long time. I think we still have some email that we occasionally forward to each other to laugh about where he like links to some some Bitcoin mailing list posts like from like 2012 or 2013. He's like guys I think this thing's pretty serious. He was definitely the original of of my family to kind of bring it up and I kind of played it off for a while like didn't pay too much attention to it because I wasn't really deep into you know, a lot of the topics that I think that I've bitcoiners care about. I was pretty politically and active. I didn't really pay much attention to economics. I was just kind of in it Like the fun stuff and so theorem grab me pretty early on because there was lots of shiny stuff and like, you know, it's kind of easy to understand as as an application developer. And so, you know, it kind of has this really attractive upfront quality that you know grabs people who you know at surface level have only just kind of looked into this stuff. Would you say, you know, just to be clear would you say that you're more of a Bitcoin? In person now or are you still in aetherium person? Oh a hundred percent Bitcoin for sure. I think that you know, I'm very understanding of people I think on the boat on both sides because I I see the qualities, you know that people are looking for in this the thing the main difference for me is for one like Bitcoin delivers on pretty much everything that people are looking for it. Now, of course people like to point out the like peer-to-peer digital cash thing that it doesn't really get used for that, but but I don't think No one's trying to sell it at this point. So Bitcoin pretty much delivers on all of its promises. Whereas my sort of moment where I started to phase over was as as a developer working on a theory. Mm. I was running my own node since that's you know, that's what you're supposed to do and after a while I just couldn't keep up with it. It was expanding beyond the abilities of the hardware. I was running it on. I was having a lot of trouble like just keeping guests from freezing up. I tried parody but then there are bugs between those two implementations like differences that you know, you run into Corner cases there. You know, I just kind of was like scared. I was scared. I was you know in trusting a lot of my money into the system that I was slowly but surely losing faith in and so when it came time for me to try out Bitcoin spin up a bit coin D, it just worked and it you know synced in a reasonable amount of time and once I sort of understood time preference and you know manually setting transaction fees I realized oh Like I don't really care that much about block time when I'm moving my digital gold, you know, it's not really a payments platform necessarily and that was also where I started to look into lightning because I thought well, you know, we're going to need a payments platform. What's it going to be and and lightning was still in its early days, but but it was there. Okay, would you say that maybe the people that are you know in aetherium that are still kind of plugging away at it people that you might have worked with previously. You think that they're totally off-base do you think that entire project is doomed to fail? I don't think they are for a lot of reasons one is that unless you're working on a certain set of problems like ethereum offers a lot of interesting problems to work on and you can probably get paid to do that. I think there's a lot of funding in the ethereum ecosystem. And so I think for some people they're interested in the research. The the politics or the monetary theory behind it is secondary. They just want to work on interesting problems and etherium has plenty of interesting problems, which can be fun. If you're a researcher. It could be really bad if you're you know, a user or a developer. I also think that there are certain sets of problems that Bitcoin isn't interested in solving, you know, like the idea of smart contracts at least in the short term and aetherium does kind of work for that today. I mean if you want to to build like a distributed, you know gambling system that doesn't rely on proven Randomness, you know, if you want like real time proof that you've got a random system, you know, it can do that and I don't think anybody's trying to build that for Bitcoin. So, you know, I think people have reasonable reasons that they choose to work on ethereum, but I also think that they tend to not have thought a lot about it from a holistic standpoint, you know, I think people who are interested in The tech room just in the tech people who are interested in building fun games or only interested in that it's only kind of in Bitcoin where you see people who have these like totally multi-faceted interests in the economics in the politics, you know have the technical background to understand it understand the game theory implications of how these systems work understand networking. Like you have to understand a lot of things for Bitcoin to make sense, which is a lot to ask for for your average. Each person that's interesting kind of understanding why you would move over to bitcoin here. So are you saying you're kind of more sold on the overall Bitcoin ethos versus the you know, maybe put it in in the scare quotes for the ethereum ethos. Yeah. I mean, it's a little hard. I feel that a theorem doesn't have a consistent narrative. So it's a little hard to say what that ethos is and I think there are certain aspects of Bitcoin that I still like em at odds with I don't you know, sometimes I always feel like I'm Hundred percent aligned with the like air quotes Community, you know, I think really what it comes down to is the Unix philosophy of design which is to do one thing and to do it really well and Bitcoin tends to do it's it's one thing really well and that's just a lot easier to reason about as as a developer and as someone who's, you know, got some of their money tied up in it when you first started developing on bitcoin. Was it developing on lightning or was it developing? On base chain of pickling. So I had a few kind of brief interactions with Bitcoin from a development standpoint before I really don't have into it and it very strongly turn me off from it just in terms of like getting your head around the you T XO model when when you know, you're kind of used to the way databases work where you kind of have these like easy ways to look up balances and keep track of things where now you've got like all these distributed coins and you have Like combine them together that was pretty daunting up front. And so I kind of I had a brief some brief interactions with it and was initially turned away. It wasn't until lightning kind of lured me in where I was like, okay, you've got this one node, you know, it's got a an available balance that can draw from like the reason channels exist is because there are not fungible unlike Bitcoins which should be fungible and so I was confused about the you txo model which of course I understand all that. That a lot better now, but you know from the outset lightning looks a lot more like what a developer might expect from payment system. So I kind of came in from the top down started learning about lightning after a while of learning about it. You want to know the underlying layer and that is where Bitcoin started to come together and make sense to me. So yeah, I would say started with lightning and then kind of work my way down from there. Okay. And what was your first project working on Lightning? So it was Jewel. I had the very good fortune and definitely not. Nepotism of being able to join the chain code they're known for their summer residency where they spend I think it's like 12 weeks to get people to work on bitcoin. They did a sort of a short thematically appropriate lightning residency where they did one week and they just had some awesome people in Alex Bosworth Christian Decker, you know, just a bunch of the the lightning All-Stars came in for a week and we learned about it and we built something on it. And so jewel is my project there. I was kind of coming coming again from the ethereum background. I was used to this extension meta mask which plugs and etherium wallet into your browser and I thought okay, this is something that would be really cool with lightning because you know, what's the point of micro payments if you have to like open up a terminal and paste in a you know, a payment request to make payments like it should happen kind of seamlessly and so I built that there and people got a little bit more excited about it than I had expected. So, you know, I kind of kept working with that and then a month later I released it. Properly in the extension store and people started using it. I definitely have to say it's one of the more underrated Chrome extensions out there. I know it's not a wallet per se but it's probably the one that I use like 99% of the time, you know, there's there might be times where I pop out my phone and I use our mobile lightning wallet, but most of the time I'm using my main node with Jewel so awesome N I love hearing that. You know, I take a little bit of credit. It but also use this as a as a caveat of being one of the first other than zap lightning wallets and zap at the time was doing the same thing that Jules still doing which is it just communicates with an existing node over our PC now is that you can create your own node. I don't know that I'll ever get there with Jewel just because for one it's a little bit of a power user tool right now. I think it requires a decent bit of of just know how I've had a separate note. And also I'm Kind of personally horrified at the idea of writing software that fully controls anode. But yeah, the the caveat that comes with that was I didn't have all these awesome wallets to kind of use as inspiration and I think since having made it, you know, I feel totally outclassed when I'm using something like like breeze or a Claire. I just think they're mobile wallets really nail a lot of the kind of look and feel that you want. Out of a lightning wallet and meanwhile drill the starting to look more and more like like enterprise software like Microsoft Excel or something to me, but you know, it was it was an early foray into it and and I'm happy to kind of have been superseded by by these full teams that are you know now building businesses on top of lightning. I mean, I'm just wondering you know, who else is going to take up the mantle of Jewel, you know, I know you were kind of telling me before We started recording that you haven't been able to work on it as much lately. Yeah, it's unfortunate as I'm sure a lot of Open Source developers have encountered like at a certain point you can keep working on this stuff until until the money runs out. I was sort of getting there and and I love working on Jewel and I continue to support it. But I've since kind of had to go back to putting it on the back burner as a side project, but I I like the way you phrase take up the mantle because I really do think that lightning on the web. has sort of taken a backseat to mobile apps and I'm really glad that people have made these these really sleek and you know functional mobile apps, but I really I'm just kind of sad to see lightning move away from from the web which is where I think it makes the most sense because with mobile apps for one, you're always going to be in the Walled Garden of Apple and Google, you know, you're going to be at the mercy of What API is they add to mobile apps and you know being in the Mobile store and they have such a strong incentive to to not have lightning or Bitcoin succeed because they can't take their 30% cut of sales when you're paying with Bitcoin. Where is the web is just completely open platform where you know, as long as you can communicate it over HTTP you can do whatever you want. And so I really do hope that we see See kind of a stronger like web driven lightning experience emerge and hopefully the mobile apps can kind of foster that a little bit instead of fragmenting it because I just kind of feel like we've got a bunch of good mobile payments as it is. I mean, honestly if you want peer-to-peer Anonymous local payments, like nothing beats cash. So I just don't look at you know, the mobile use cases being the most interesting one to me. Okay. Do you have any At the lightening up yourself at the moment Manuel. I really liked the episode you did with crypto to couple of days ago. I feel like that guys that guy was a huge inspiration for me just like sort of pushing the use case of like little fun apps and and I really appreciate that. He has this laissez-faire attitude about like not needing everything to be perfect just to get it out there. So big shout outs to crypto. I'm really excited to see the gaming space move forward with things. It's like light night and the zbd guys working on their games. But as for my day-to-day uses I would say, you know, I mostly use lightning is a tipping platform right now. So bottle pay and tipping me. That's kind of been really the only use case to stick Beyond going to a website and just trying something out once and then, you know, not really coming back. So I think I think it's still a really under explored area. Let's go Jump back into Jewel a little bit here. So how long did you work on that? You know when you were actually working on it. So I probably gave Jewel an honest year of my life with some other projects sprinkled in there because I kind of always knew that Jewel. I'm just one guy, you know, and I didn't want to like try to turn it into a business or take VC funding or whatever and hire people to work on it. So I always knew that it has a sort of intrinsic shelf life beyond what the open source Community wants to deal with it. So I really invested a lot of my time and effort into trying to foster a development Community around lightning and so I've pushed more on things like web Ln which is this sort of open standard that Jewel uses but a few other wallets, like blue wallet have implemented to allow web apps to like request and make payments try to push forward some like use cases that I hope other people adopt like allowances and auto payments and also tried to get the lightning. App developer Community going with some some open source demos and some tutorials and stuff like that. So, you know rather than build stuff myself because I know I'm I'm eventually going to run out of steam or get hit by a bus or whatever. I've really been more trying to focus on getting more people like me who may be billed etherium applications to say. Oh, what's this lightning thing? Let me check it out. Oh cool. It has a strong developer Community. Let me like give that a shot. Okay. Was there anything that was kind of? Fficult while working on Jewel developing it honestly working working with lightning is like a dream at least, you know at the time I would say L&D was clear in a way that the strongest API amongst the lightning nodes. I know there's been a lot of effort from other node implementations to kind of catch up on that front. So I would say the actual API level is really just awesome to work with especially compared to like working with Bitcoin D. But one one thing that really stands out to me and and I've seen a bunch. Of products struggle with this as well is just like the way that software has been going is very anti cypherpunk like host your own Hardware type stuff. For instance. You'll probably remember that like five years ago. You didn't see that many websites use https and now every website uses https, and that's great because you want to have these encrypted connections with website so that people can snoop on your traffic the problem. Is that the The way that HTTP is kind of developed is we've actually centralized the web a lot by having these certificate authorities. You have these organizations that mint these SSL certificates and the way most browsers and a lot of software works is that they check with the certificate authorities. So if I want to have a secure encrypted connection with my lightning node, I have to use a self-signed certificate because one of the certificate authorities won't meant one for me and a lot of software just assumes that that's malicious. Havior when in reality, you know, it's just me trying to run my own stuff. So today a lot of the difficulties that I've run into with lightning development is just that all of the software that we work on is really centered around the idea of having one of the big guys kind of give you the okay, whether it's writing a mobile app and having to deal with store rules or writing a web app and having to deal with DNS or certificate authorities a lot of the stuff that we're Building on top of just isn't really meant for for the little guy who kind of wants to have his own hackers set up which is really unfortunate. And I definitely seemed like Casa for instance having their know that runs in your home, you know that has a self-signed certificate as well and and they've just chosen in their case to not hosted over https. So you have an insecure unencrypted connection to your casa node, which I totally understand the choice they made but you know, it sucks that we have to forego encryption because of its sort of centralized nature in the browser. Well, I guess is there anything really that can be done to address that on a large scale at all on a large scale? It's hard to say. I mean one thing is that you know our browsers at least Google Chrome and you know Safari which have a huge browser share our, you know run by Google and apple who certainly don't mind centralizing factors being you know, it kind of helps their business model. So supporting alternative browsers. Think helps push that a little bit and then but but from that standpoint, you know, you still have to get these things kind of everyone to agree on them. So I think that Mozilla is probably the most open to the sort of this use case of like I want to run my own hardware and so, you know, maybe filing issues on the Mozilla bug tracker But ultimately it's it's really hard as an individual to make an effort in this aside from being vocal. I just wanted to maybe kind of touch on a few of the Other lightning apps that you develop. I think you have maybe two other ones. Is that right? It's hard to know what you consider a nap. I definitely have a few toys out there. Sure. Well, let's talk about the toys then so tip Hub is the one that first comes to mind, which was right after the craze of tipping me really blowing up when Jack gave a shout-out to that project. I kind of had this mindset of like, okay Tippin's cool, but it's custodial and I don't have anything inherently against custodial. Applications I mean, you know I use venmo to settle up with my friends. I still use PayPal on occasion and those are inherently centralized services and I don't I'm not like shaking in my boots that they're going to steal my money any day. And so, you know, I think any project that's attached to a real person with a real name who lives in a first world country. Like I'm not worried about them just running off and stealing my money, but I thought that you know, at least for my censorship resistance and sort of a being self-sufficient standpoint there should Be an open source alternative. So I built this self. It's not self hosted. It is still hosted on a website but it's a way to hook up your lightning node to receive tips. Even when you're not there to generate invoices and you can embed a tip button into your GitHub projects. So GitHub projects have these readme files that will render like images and links and stuff. So it has a little button there. So people can support your open source projects. And so that was a really fun one to build because I you know, what? Great thing about writing software that you would use is you get to use it. And so I've thrown those buttons on the bottom of my projects and I get tips, you know, not like a ton, but I get beer money like every few days maybe every few weeks. It's just super gratifying to like connect with people on that level and to not have to Jimmy Wales style like add a giant blocking header on your Wikipedia page. It says like please give me money, but just have a little tip jar and for people to to drop Money in there and to know that that was a peer-to-peer interaction. I didn't have to trust a third party service to the hold on to the money got it and was there one more thing that you developed as well? I'm trying to think. Well, I could have sworn there was that would be I don't I don't at all want to take credit for this like even in the least, but I do want to find any opportunity to shout out that one of the contributors to Jewel. His name is Jamal James had I had this idea of like a way to spin up simulated environments for developers to work on lightning and he he took this idea and totally ran with it and made this this really cool. Upper tool called polar which I have been shouting from the rooftops. I don't know if you mistook that is something I had involvement in. I helped like a very little bit but it's all on him. But if you're a developer interested in lightning, you should totally check out polar. It's like the coolest tool. I think there is another thing that I actually wanted to mention here at this point. It's not an app or anything per se you did make a series of medium articles tutorial for developing a web lightning web app at that. Is that right? Yeah. So I've been really aren't you know, if I'm being honest I've been frustrated with the lightning Community because I haven't seen on the Node front. There's a ton of great open source development, but on the application front whether it's because people are too embarrassed because they don't think their Source codes good enough for because people are trying to you know, keep their secret sauce secret. I don't know what but there hasn't been a ton of open source application development. So that was something I really wanted to change because most developers. I know really learned by like looking at working projects reading the code understanding how they work tweaking it and then building their own thing. So that was what I wanted to do. So in addition to open sourcing my projects like tip Hub and oh, you know, the the other one you were probably thinking of was the Run L&D shirt sale. There you go. Yeah. Yeah where you had to prove that you were running an l and D node by signing a message and then you could buy this t-shirt. So open sourcing projects like tip Hub like run L&D and then making this this article series because The thing that makes lightning better is getting more people in it. Like it's a network and in order to have a bigger stronger Network. You need more people both users and developers. And so, you know that that's just been a huge priority for me. Got it. Okay. Well, I mean, I've looked at the series multiple times because you know, I've been wanting to become, you know, actually learn how to do more of these things. But I don't you know, I have some experience in Python, but not much experience in JavaScript and I believe you have typescript on this particular project. Is that right? Yeah typescript I think is it's really important to use language that you can have a lot of faith in it doing the right thing when you're dealing with people's money. So I usually advise people to use typescript. I like python, you know, I I want to recommend it but given its runtime error nature where you don't know the code is going to have problems until it actually reaches that point in code. I usually advise people to stick with the type language. For for their lightning projects because there are all sorts of unexpected failures that can happen and you don't want people losing money as a result of that. Okay. Let's say I'm a in advanced newbie. I'm not sure if that'll help but how difficult do you think it would be for someone that's dedicated for them to pick up the series of Articles and pump out a nap here. I mean, I would like be overly complimentary myself and say it's super easy because I did a great job, but I mean the reality of it is I broke it out into two pieces because I knew it would be a big load for people to take on at once but I think that you know, as long as you're not completely horrified by the terminal it's actually really kind of friendly to get started because for one the typescript compiler it's going to like gently let you know where your errors are as opposed to a lot of development where you get an error in a line number and you hope it's going to point you in the right direction and likewise the node developers have done a really great job at just writing. You know really robust software that works all the time at least in my experience in most people I know as experience. So you're not going to run into the kind of issues where it's like, oh no, I forgot to set this like compiler flag and you know, I'm running into weird States like most at least L&D, which I use for the tutorial is super easy to spin up even more. So if you use that app polar that I was just pimping out and so I think once you get the project just running Just displaying the very basic. I think the first post just has it display your nodes info like it's plain text. Once you get there. It's just slow iterations, which I think anybody's easily capable of just follow instructions. And then once you actually get it running, it's pretty easy to see where you can tweak it. You can either tweak, you know, just two Styles if you want to make it your own or you can tweak some of the functionality by changing like simple constant values and I think like the more that You feel comfortable changing it you start to understand more and more of the pieces. And before you know it I feel like you can transform it into just a completely different application than the little the little toy. I have you built. So do you think someone doing these articles are going to pick anything up if they manage to make their way through it? Yeah, I think I think you'll get a deeper understanding of the way lightning transactions work, even though they feel instant. They're actually asynchronous and you need to wait for them to go through you'll probably get a decent understanding of how a modern web application works where you've got some code running in the browser on your users computer and then some code running in the cloud on a server on you know, some computer that's publicly accessible and then you'll also one thing that I think is a good Fringe benefit here is you'll understand better how to secure your node but to not have to like lock it away one like pet peeve I've had for a while Liz the the Bitcoin developers have said like never expose your Bitcoin node to the public internet because you know, you don't know what white bad things people are going to be doing and while that's a good philosophy in general. It can be really frustrating in the use case where you want to have your note accessible like and to be able to use it on the go and see you don't have to trust a block Explorer something like that. Whereas the the lightning approach for all the note implementations that I know of they have a high. Level of confidence in the security of their nodes and what you should be able to expose and what you should lock down. And so I think it'll it'll get you to be a better note Operator by running through these you'll understand how to communicate with your node how to secure it and how to program your money to, you know, interact with it in a safe way. Okay. Can I briefly said that, you know, if you have you know are comfortable with command line that you should be able to jump onto this thing. You know, would you say that there is any other things that people should be already aware of or Ready halves perience then before they jump on this or you know, I used to say at least have a lightning node again. Not not to keep shelling but with polar you really don't need that. I would say just have a tenacious attitude, you know coding is pretty hard. I know there's this kind of a running joke on the internet of like just telling people and industries that are really suffering right now. Like, oh just learn how to code developers get paid so much money, but you know, it's a difficult task to really wrap your head around some of that. So I would say come in with the attitude. That like you're going to have to spend some time learning if coding isn't already second nature to you. Okay, and would you encourage any listeners out there thinking about it to go ahead and to try to give this thing a shot or something II think that if you know you want to if you're if you're motivated to learn more about lightning, even if you don't want to publish your own app, I think it's great, but maybe after either getting a little comfortable tutorial or if you want to really Dive In In in a way that you're really helping people out. I would say look for existing open source projects out there also and see where maybe you can contribute. I think this is great for for getting your bearings. But you know, I think I think really building a community and not having people all work on their own projects separately, but have people come together and work on stuff together really makes makes us better developers and it makes stronger projects and it makes people not feel so Alone, you know just like sitting in their room working on these projects by themselves, but you're actually a part of this this huge movement. So what you say, it's accurate that you've been actively trying to get more developers into lightning. Yeah. I mean, I just think that's the one Edge that I think etherium has had and still continues to have and you know, a lot of people would dismiss that and say, oh, well, they're just, you know, they're building crap or whatever and and I think that's that's too simplistic. I think that when you capture developers, it's there's sort of a time lag with with the kind of value. It has is people aren't building amazing things right when they show interest but slowly you get mind share amongst the people who keep this thing running and as much as I love the usual cast of characters that we have here in the Bitcoin community in the lightning Community. You have to sustain growth for the Long Haul especially if as a lot of these, you know, a lot of people who are holding Bitcoin are are talking about like And generations of wealth like we need to make sure that we keep people interested and and you know, keep building up the next round of developers and that's why I love organizations like chain code, you know Square for having the square crypto team trying to get more people in the space either existing developers from from outside of Bitcoin or to grow new developers who have shown like a little interest in Bitcoin to turn them into full-fledged developers. So what's the actual pitch here, you know? There's this ethereum fan had to get them into into lightning Mmm Yeah, I that's that's pretty tough. I would say as much as I love a good meme. It's really hard to mean people in because memes by definition have to spread to the masses and I really think you have to you have to connect with somebody on what they're there for, you know, what interested them in aetherium if they're interested in the tech. Like I think lightning is such an obvious win when you know, you start Being at the different note implementations in their apis and some of the cool programmable things like hot all invoices and and you know being able to what is it Rusty rustles. I think it's Rusty's but I could be totally wrong but the the chat app built on top of the lightning Network, you know, just things like that. I think lightning has a ton of technical Marvel's to it, you know if they're interested in the transactions per second. Or the privacy or you know kind of those more metrics driven type of things getting them to understand that the lightning network is totally boundless. I think it's huge and getting them to understand that you don't need a blockchain for certain transactions. You can have a high degree of certainty even being off chain. And I think that you know, some people are just turned off of Bitcoin because they had a bad impression of it from a long time ago for some reason or another and so, you know, just approaching people with With kindness and interest and you know trying to bring them into the flock rather than drive them out. I think is always a good approach and you know, maybe you don't gain a true Bitcoin Ur right that minute but you at least don't make an enemy. Okay, would you say that it's almost more likely that you would get someone to jump into lightning if they weren't already exposed to, you know, a different cryptocurrency and some other previous time. I think lightning actually plays well with people who have Um some understanding of cryptocurrency that maybe you're a little disillusioned with their projects. I mean one thing is that that even aetherium core developers will tell you that like layer 2 is the way out of a lot of the problems and and and so many people they have either heard of lightning or they've heard of other layer 2 Solutions like Z cash as the confusingly named bolts, you've got things like plasma and Ridin on a theorem they've heard of these and and they just Assume like okay, it's coming. It's coming. It's some ways off. And so if you can really truly show someone who's already familiar with those. Hey Bitcoin has this cool thing called lightning and it works today like it a hundred percent works. It doesn't just kind of work, you know, it's actually their people are transacting real money on it. I think that that can be really powerful for them to see that that this stuff is feasible that it's here and all they need to do is You Know download an app set up a wallet maybe running a node and they can do it too do you see, you know, lightning kind of transforming, you know, the lay of the land with Bitcoin and maybe and crypto generally and you know in more ways than we have now. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I think lightning suffers the same problem that Bitcoin did which is that it's sort of its identity isn't fully formed yet as to what it's good for. Or what people actually intrinsically want to use it for I know that you had Shinobi on and he hates micropayments and you know, we've heard a lot of different use cases for lightning but none of them have strongly emerged yet as the killer app. I think that It's hard to see Bitcoin being anything other than the store value for the for the short term. So I don't really see people buying coffee, you know, the the classic buying coffee example, like nobody wants to do that. I don't know about you but I don't want to sell my Bitcoin for anything so I don't see that kind of payment working out. I mean, I think what's really awesome and why I like to encourage developers into the space is if you can make a completely unique experience that you can only participate in By spending lightning Bitcoin you no longer have to really argue about like, okay well as Lightning good for this or that because if people want what you have they're willing to to do it, even if they're you know, they haven't totally convinced themselves that they want to and so, you know, I think like satoshi's place is kind of a good example of that people were totally engulfed in the idea of having their pixel on that board and they really wanted it. And so I think that really on board a bunch of people because unless you did it lightning there was no way around it. And I think I think that's why I really like the game use case is if you have a lightning driven game and the only way to play that game is through lightning payments people are people are gonna want to do it. So you can sort of Drive scarcity by creating assets that you're only willing to exchange for lightning. Do you think it's likely that any bigger games or ever going to adopt lightning as their in-game method of you know, getting people on boarded and Monetize Etc. I mean, I won't say no because I think that there will always be Fringe groups that need an uncensored herbal payment methods so that you could be that could be gambling that could be like sex games. So, you know, I could see you one of those communities adopting something that has the the privacy and uncensor ability benefits of lightning but I think ultimately we're going to have to see a lot of the like user experience form before we see anything like that. I won't pretend to know exactly how some of these games are implemented. But right now there isn't really a strong Universal way to hook up my wallet over here to make payments over there. Other than you know by by sending money to them and just having an internal Ledger there and at that point you're not really leveraging the benefits of lightning you're just using you know. Rose in a database like it might as well be Fortnight V bucks or whatever. So I think that you know, that's one reason why I really like the web and I really was trying to push the standard of doing the payments in the browser is because the the unique benefit of lightning payments is that you're in control of the money and games typically have not had that direct level of interaction. So I think unless we can shape a user experience where people are used to program. Being their own personal node, you know their own wallet and like giving limited access for applications to make payments and stuff like that. We're going to continue to see this sort of custodial focus with it, which I think from a larger game developer standpoint. Like there's no benefit to using lightning at that point if they're already fully in control. They might as well control the whole space. I mean, I have a hard time seeing a game company like adopting Bitcoin and adopting lightning. I don't really see. See the overall advantage to them in that maybe I'm being short-sighted. No II think that's a very reasonable approach. I mean any company is going to do what's most profitable and I think unless we see some like absolutely insane shifts in the way the world thinks of currency. Like Bitcoin is always going to be kind of this, you know, unnecessary add-on for most Payment Systems games included. Okay, do you see there being Any interesting use cases in the future that maybe right now aren't practical or anything like that. So I think again I want to say it was Rusty but I'm going to be so embarrassed if I miss attributing but the example of the the encrypted uncensored herbal chat app over lightning. I think really opened kind of this this door of the fact that you know, we're all were all running these always on machines that Are all talking to each other and there's payments built into that. What what can we leverage with that given that I've already set up this node. I don't really mind if I am getting more inbound and outbound traffic from it if it's making me money, so I could see there being things like, you know vpns where you may be directly open a channel and your nodes talk back and forth chat apps, you know as noted before. If you like file sharing networks where you have a hub node, that's kind of like your torrent tracker and and you know, you're communicating over that I guess the court sort of the Crux of it is I don't think anyone wants to be bouncing over hops in the network to do this. So I would be interested to see direct channels where I open a channel to your node that sort of being more leveraged and abused as just a general like hey, I have a TCP connection to you. Let's send some um stuff back and forth and I'm able to pay you very easily for doing that is the lightning Network what actually scales Bitcoin. Sorry to put you on the spot. No, that's it. It's a good question. I really think of scaling was our only problem that you would see people like just using the coinbase app and sending money back and forth to each other using that because you know, you can do it with no transaction fees because it's just a database. Update for them. I mean obviously you risk the censorship and and all that but for 99% of people their use case that doesn't even pop into their mind when it just comes to sending money. So I think if that were the biggest problem we would have a really popular custodial app, but we don't at least to my knowledge, you know, maybe in certain communities and Pockets people are using some kind of custodial app, but no, I don't think that lightning solves scaling but more so because I don't know that scaling yet is is like the most imminent failure case for Bitcoin, you know, I think I think it's good when blocks are full that shows that you know, the market is valuing Bitcoin appropriately that we have as many miners, you know doing as much work as a network needs and we have as many people using it as a network can handle. Okay. So, how about an alternative to scale? And what about the lightning improved privacy? Oh, absolutely. I feel like I mean people do talk about it. So I don't want to say it's it's totally unmentioned. But I feel like when people talk about the benefits of lightning they talk about speed they talk about, you know, the block size problem scaling and I just feel like it's really understated how valuable the lightning Network is for privacy, especially given I think a lot of people don't understand that you can have these private nodes that have private channels where it's not broadcast to The Wider Network and that channel opens and channel closes on chain or indistinguishable. You can use some heuristics to try to guess which things are Channel opens and channel closes, but it's not it's not Surefire. So if you really wanted to be completely private on the Bitcoin Network, all it would take is to open direct private channels to the things that you want to use or to just open direct private channels to Nodes and do hops to where you want to send money and you could even set up two nodes send to yourself and basically have a private coin. Okay, would you say that privacy on bitcoin is one of your personal interests? Hmm. It's a good question. I see the value in it. I don't know if I find it to be like the sexiest problem because I think I have this unfortunate benefit of living in, you know, being an upstanding citizen. Listen who lives in a country that's generally somewhat free and so I'm not faced day-to-day with with privacy problems with censorship problems. You know, I don't really I don't find myself in a fringe group where I'm concerned about that kind of stuff. So I I think that as a developer it's really important to work on something that you're personally passionate about that you gain a lot of benefit from because you're going to you're going to build the best damn thing if you're going to use it and I think a lot of cases I've I've been a bad. I've been bad to my own privacy. I'm sure that you could docks me eight ways to Sunday if you were an invested party. So I you know, I it's something I have a lot of respect for but not something that I personally put first and foremost on my mind when I'm building something. Okay. So what would you say is your current interest? You know, let's say you were able to jump back into Bitcoin and lightning land. You know, what would be your specific little thing that you'd go back to? I mean the person that I love building most for is Somebody who kind of falls through the gaps and and otherwise has a hard time working with the kinds of systems. We have like I remember this story. Do you remember that phone app Flappy Bird? Yes, unfortunately. Yeah. Well, I you know, I got to give a lot of credit. It was made by some guy in Southeast Asia who it was like, you know, just a really small simple side project for him through it up on the App Store and it became an overnight sensation and so for starters like 30 percent of everything that that kind of made went. Apple which, you know when you're living in which poor country like 30% could go a very long way and then because you know, he was such a public individual as a result of that. He started receiving a lot of threats and just you know, had a really bad time of it. And so like I think of that guy when I'm building stuff is like I really want to empower these people who like Bitcoin totally works for them, you know, Bitcoin like would be the a great use case for them whether you're like a Sex worker who gets deep platform by every, you know, financial institute even though what you're doing is totally legal or you know, if you're trying to raise money for something but you know, you rub people the wrong way like I just want to make sure that while maybe you don't have the best user experience like there's always a pretty good option for you. So I've really like the kind of surge of interest in these sort of On tape clones for lightning. I don't think any of them have quite nailed it yet. So I think that's an area still for improvement. You know, I think I think content platforms whether it's like a streaming site or something still seems to me to be a really interesting use case for lightning but I think all of these like we're still really early days in so I don't feel this like mad rush to start working on these things because I know that lightning still has some ways to go from a protocol standpoint. It still has a ton of way to go from an adoption standpoint. You know, I just I really hope that it's all still there waiting for me. Once I feel it's matured to a point where I can take it back on as a full time Endeavor. So do you think that Bitcoin and lightning Network are they helping real people are they in the shape where they could help real people with the Privacy, you know, and maybe more of countries that aren't as friendly as the United States. Yeah. That's that's a really good question. I have a ton of respect for for Lee Chi Hoon who writes for coin desk? I know. you know, she doesn't always get along with the community very well, but that's because I think that she kind of holds us to our word in a lot of ways and she's done a lot of reporting on like the efficacy of Bitcoin in you know, these sorts of either war-torn or totalitarian government run places and you know, whether or not it works and so I think we really Had to eat some Humble Pie when we look at like the recent Iran government internet shut down where Bitcoin could be the coolest thing on the planet, but you know, if the backbone of the internet that we all rely on suddenly gets pulled out from under us like it does nothing for us. You know, I think the place is were Bitcoin is helping right now. They're few and far between where it could not have potentially been solved by Else but you know, I'm okay with that in that we're getting better and we're you know, we're plugging the holes and this is a multi-decade journey that were on to build the best damn payment system that we can and you know, I really appreciate the people working on things like go Tena and and you know, these other like distributed internet systems and peer-to-peer networks. Mesh Network stuff like that, you know people who are really Setting us up to be able to test the limits of of how hard could it be to shut this thing down, but I would say to directly answer your question. I really think Bitcoin is not doing is not doing as much as we want it to is there any way for us to change that? You know, I think one thing that really helps is to try to be a little less complacent in your life and I'm like the main offender on this but you know, just every time you got to tie. in Google or sore, you know, you go to use one of these services that that totally opens you up to the possibility of of being censored or being taken down like go look for an alternative or try to shake up something in your life that you take for granted, you know, whether it's some aspect of your connection to the internet or some way that you communicate with somebody, you know, install Signal or like enable encryption on your hard drive when you turn it off just do a little bit more to be thoughtful. About the way you interact with technology because I think a lot of what these projects suffer from is lack of interest and lack of users because people don't have to think about these things. And so I think if they see more people using it and there's more of a financial interest in developing out these Solutions because there's a market for it will totally see people build more towards this future that that I think everybody who's really deeply involved in Bitcoin wants to see if you could wave a magic wand and you know, No, I either create an app or otherwise change how lightning currently Works, what would that be or what would you do? That's a good question. I would probably want to really extend the sort of apis that we take like that we can expect everyone to have access to on Lightning. So right now the the only thing that you can be sure of for somebody running any form of node is that their bolt spec compliant, so it's these Rules that talk about like how nodes communicate to each other. You know, how payment invoices are structured that kind of stuff like very core low-level stuff. But as we solidify in those and we build up more I would love to see more certainty around things. Like how do I program my node to automatically make payments or automatically generate invoices to accept and just kind of expand on the things that we can build with Lightning by having. And everybody's no to work with it because I just think that a lot of the cool futuristic use cases that we talked about with lightning right now are really hard to push forward when everybody's running slightly different software and it doesn't quite work the same way. You know, I think I think we're just sort of stuck right now in the traditional payments that we have and we're not really going to leverage a lot of lightning if we stick with the same style of like the same things you could do with credit card payments the same things that you Could do with you know PayPal so pushing pushing forward the ways in which we can use lightning without taking it into context of like, oh, I've Apple pay on my phone. So lightning should work the same way as that like in my opinion. We should be like throwing out the Playbook of how payments are done and starting to think from scratch. Like what would you want in this super futuristic ideal payment system. Do you want to maybe flesh that out a little bit like you have any Ux ideas, you want to cook up for us here? Yeah. So again, this is kind of why I struggle with the mobile app thing is because I feel like you know with mobile you're really locked down to what phones offer so it's hard for me to expand on that but like for instance, I think it would be awesome. If everybody's computer ran a little server that anybody could publicly ping it to say like request a payment and so I would have some program running on my computer that Now how to speak this language you would have a little database built into it that I could enter like. Oh if it's like my kid accept any payment up to $10 a week, you know for their allowance and if it's this Subscription Service only accept up to like $7.99 a month because that's what our agreed-upon price was and to really preserve this idea that people can ask without it being too problem problematic because I think that a lot of the dark patterns we see see on the web with like these free articles that you scroll down. Then they hit you with a payment or these like free-to-play games that kind of like milk you and uncomfortable ways to pay come from like applications having a hard time getting you to pay. So by opening you up to making these smaller daily payments, but to also like get people interested in the idea of programming their payments so that they're not totally bombarded all the time with the psychology of having to spend money that you know if I can set up A $10 a month fund budget where I'm just like willing to spend it on things that I actually care about that. I don't you know, clutch it my pearls every time somebody asked me to pay, you know ten cents for an article or something like that because I think when people talk about micro payments, they mostly failed from a psychological standpoint and so by you know, basically getting past that by saying look like, you know, a few pennies here a few pennies there like isn't a big deal to me we can open ourselves to getting more rich tent that were actually paying for you know, I think I definitely seen that in myself at some point, you know, definitely them the move over of that psychology. I think a couple years ago. I was using yours that org. Unfortunately, it's all good. I you know, I have a love in my heart for anybody who tries to do something totally wacky. I know a lot of people hate on like herb it and you know, I just I can't help but like these these weird ideas that are bound to fail but I mean II really Like the idea of you know, I'm throwing down cash for you know, good quality content. I am not sure if it ever got to that point on there, but the concept was great and I'm a Content producer right? I'm you know doing that right now Apparently one thing that I really wish that I had in Bitcoin land was the ability to have subscriptions done automated because I don't want to have some hacky thing going on. I don't want them to have to deal with some hacky thing because I feel like there is no good way to make that happen. I mean even in Fiat land like I have to go sign up for patreon and do all that. I don't want to sign up for patreon. Do you think it's likely that we'll see the subscription thing being more likely in the short term. I definitely know I remember Rusty mentioning at the lightning conference about a bunch of different things coming, but I think if I remember it was going to come at the famous 18 month time frame or something like pretty far away, but do you see Anything along those lines come in the shorter term. Yeah. I mean, I love Rusty's proposal. But I do think that 18 months is honestly optimistic given it's just a really big spec to swallow. He had a lot of ideas for how invoices could be smarter and and and I love all of them, but it's really hard to get, you know, all the note implementations to agree on it and spec it out. I mean probably what we'll see in the short term. ERM I mean, I think I've been a huge fan of L and he's macaroon system from the start. The idea is that you have these like little it's kind of like oauth like when you sign up for a website using like Facebook or Twitter and they say like this website can read this data and maybe post is you sometimes it's the same idea of giving this permission to access to people to access your node. And right now it's pretty naive it only lets you do very like specific hard-coded things like Use this endpoint for sending payments and stuff like that, but it is a of giving people permission access and I really hope we see that in all forms of life. I mean, I think the thing that's really shitty about credit cards about giving out your mailing address your email address. Your phone number is like your public key is your private key in those situations are like Social Security where you don't have a way of revoking some piece of information once you've given it away and I think right now, you know Bitcoin, And lightning are still suffering from that a little bit. We're like if you wanted someone to spend money on your behalf. You would have to give them your private key and by doing that you give it all away. So I don't think that it would take a spec change to come up with a paradigm where I give someone permission to access to my lightning node and that permission to access comes with certain constraints and you know, they can only exceed or they can't exceed those constraints they have to work within them and you know, I And I was like to see that in all aspects of the world. Like if I give out a website my email address. I would like to have a little token that uniquely identifies them and I can turn off that token a point in their emails won't come to me. You know, I feel like one of the best things that Bitcoin has done is introduce a synchronous encryption to the world and get people used to the idea that you can have this piece of information. You can keep it private. You can prove that you have it. You don't have to have the exact piece of information. It allows you to make proofs. And so I think we could extend that to lightning to where we're giving out. These little tokens these permission to access to our node because your Note is you know, conceivably always online if you're you know, if you're a mobile wallet, you might run into some down time, but there's no reason that people shouldn't be able to Ping your node with with some credential that says hey we agreed that you'd pay this much. Like can you do it? I think maybe one more question to kind of close us out. What do you see as being the Biggest roadblock for you know, maybe the lightning Network. Yeah, just the lightning Network on its own. I mean, I think we've got some scary shit lying in wait, you know, I don't think the network has really seen a sustained orchestrated attack on it in the same way that we've sometimes seen with Bitcoin whether it be someone trying to control mining power or you know, people attacking the peer-to-peer Network lightning has for whatever weird reason be able to kind of just do its own thing on. The side and you know, we had that CV a few months ago. We're all the note implementations had to patch and and that went largely unexploited and and we just really haven't seen a malicious actor come into the space and say, you know, how can I either steal everybody's funny or you know destroy all their money and so it'll be interesting to see what one of those looks like because if you have a sufficiently large system somebody's going to come to try to like stomp on your sand castle. So I think probably for me. Station the one thing that keeps me up at night when I think about the lighting now because like oh, yeah, we haven't really seen what that looks like do people come back online. If you were to knock every node that's online right. Now. How many of them would come back online? You know, how many are just people who set it up once and stop thinking about it or you know, how many other people who would be driven Away by one single failure in the system. We just don't know what that looks like. It's a very interesting concept. So the idea that maybe a lightning is too small for any one to give a shit right now. Yeah, it's kind of a blessing in disguise. I think Lightnings in this weird space in crypto where you see all these projects that have like way more funding and interest and they actually have development where I see lightning as having way more development than we've seen funding an interest, you know, it's crazy to me how far it's come in the last two years and to still only be at, you know, roughly like four thousand nodes online at any given time when So many projects have way more funding but far fewer active transactions per day. How about we just jump to the end and you let all the listeners know how they can find you on the internet's. Yeah thatthat sounds good to me. I occasionally post on Twitter, but I'm more of a receiver than a giver so you can find me it. Oh God. I have to spell it out at WBO. Bei are any I don't know. I hope you have shown it to something. Nobody's gonna remember I will capture and then you know, honestly the way that you can flatter me the most is show some interest in some of the open source projects. I've got going on whether that be jewel web Ln tip Hub or any of the tutorials all of my tutorials have GitHub repositories linked to them because of course all my tutorials or about code. So, you know, if you want to learn more about lightning or if you want to become a developer or you know, you just want to know how lightning works better pop in there, you know, if you have any questions like Usually people get annoyed when you treat their GitHub issue queue like a QA section, but I love that man people come in. They're asked questions. I love it. It's so good. So drop on by well perfect. Yeah. I'm always afraid of pinging people too much when I'm doing things on GitHub. But anyway, I really appreciate you joining me on the Via podcast for Chaz. It's been a pleasure man. I hope I hope to tune into many more maybe make a second appearance years from now once you've exhausted. Did your expansive guest list? Well, hey man, I hope we'll see you then, man. Take care. All right later. Boom. That was another electrifying episode of the podcast. What did you think? Did you take anything away from that episode? I definitely did and I hope you did as well at the beginning of the episode. I mentioned it costs $100 a month to for me to run the podcast just to fix that for you. It cost one point four million SATs a month to fund the Cast so if you want to chip in Bitcoin or Bitcoin over lightning, you can definitely do that at crowdfunded lightning junkies dotnet for now. Let's look forward to the future and I'll see you on the lightning Network.
This is the sixteenth episode of the Lightning Junkies podcast. In this episode we have Will O'Beirne best known for his Joule Lightning Wallet browser extension. Joule is a browser extension that allows you to access a remote LND node and do things such as create or pay invoices. Will has also created other apps and has created a tutorial to create your own Lightning web app. On this episode, we talk about:   Starting in Ethereum   Why Bitcoin? Ethereum Waste of Time? Early Bitcoin Projects    First Project on Lightning    Joule Chrome Extension    Joule Dev Taking Back Seat    Favorite Lightning Apps    Challenges Devloping with Lightning    TipHub    Polar    LN Web App Tutorial    Typescript vs Python    Difficulty of Tutorial    Getting more Devs on LN    Onboarding Ethereum Devs? Future of Lightning    Gaming on Lightning    Ideal Lightning Apps    Privacy on Lightning Network    Building for Downtrodden Users    Addressing Use-cases in the Real World    Reoccurring Payments over Lightning    Roadblocks on Lightning   Will's Twitter: https://twitter.com/wbobeirne  Joule's Twitter: https://twitter.com/LightningJoule  Will's Github: https://github.com/wbobeirne  Will's Website: http://wbobeirne.com/  Polar's Github: https://github.com/jamaljsr/polar  Part  1 of Lightning Web App Series: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/making-a-lightning-web-app-part-1-4a13c82f3f78 Part 2 of Lightning Web App Series: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/making-a-lightning-web-app-part-2-414f5d23c2d7 Part 3 of Lightning Web App Series: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/making-a-lightning-web-app-part-3-58d8c7351175 Part 4 of Lightning Web App Series: https://medium.com/@wbobeirne/making-a-lightning-web-app-part-4-c0997f4353b8 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 Pay: https://btl.to/@LNJunkies  Pay for the episode on LNCast: LNCast.com   Follow my Lightning Network blog series: https://blog.sicksubroutine.com/  Follow Lightning Junkies on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LNJunkies  Follow Chaz Cryptoson on Twitter: https://twitter.com/thechaz  ---   Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/lightning-junkies/support 