This is the lightning junkies podcast with your host Chaz crypto set on this episode of the podcast. We have Daniel Alexis from living room of the Toshi and wallet of Satoshi we talked about wallet is Satoshi and whether or not custodial wallets or good for the overall lightning ecosystem. We get back into the subject of small blocks on this episode.As well as we generally discuss the lightning Network the circular economy and much more as always if this podcast happens to bring value into your life, please chip in Via Bitcoin or Bitcoin on Lightning. I'm like crowdfunding campaign crowdfunded lightning Junkies dotnet. You can also find links to tip me in the show notes as well. There are other ways you can support the show if you cannot support the show financially these include subscribing to the show. Leaving a review and sharing on social media, especially Twitter and don't forget to tell your friends that the lightning junkies podcast is the podcast to get your lightning network fix. Let's go ahead and jump into this episode. I would like to go ahead and welcome Daniel to the lightning junkies podcast. How are you doing today? Daniel? Absolutely. So generally when I begin these sorts of interviews, I like to kind of start ad, you know, your kind of General background, you know, preferably before you got into Bitcoin or crypto generally. Well, I don't have way too much with my coming to fit coin story Omaima program a basically so I you know it download and try pretty much everything that I come across and Bitcoins one of those things. What I decided to do was try and build something practical to explore the limits of what was possible with this new technology. So I started a company called living room of Satoshi about five or six years ago in Australia, which allowed people to pay their bills with Bitcoin. Basically, you could pay your electricity bill pay your rent water bill or lesser thing. Hooked into Australia's bill payment system. So let that run for a little while and it became clear pretty quick what this new technology was capable of and what its limits for to got it. So I guess to be honest, I'm probably most familiar with qualitative Satoshi. When did that enter the picture? I guess I mean It's running it became obvious to me that Bitcoin wasn't really designed to be used like this as a retail banking system, you know, at least 10 minutes lot of times. We had to hedge the price while we're waiting for the confirmations, they weren't real time. And I mean, I previously worked at MasterCard and other retail payment systems and big one just didn't work like that. And I mean if we put in some hacks to allow 0 confirmation payments, but It was just that was just hacks. So I was waiting for technology that would sit on top of Bitcoin and become a proper retail pain system instead. Of course, I was very excited when I heard the first inklings of lightning come about and you know Bill one of the first to try it out when it when it came out. So we thought we'd build Lord of Satoshi proper retail payment system for Bitcoin. Got it. Absolutely. I'll be honest here. I've use wallet of Oh, she kind of more than I would prefer. I was I think I even called it. It's use cheating at one point just because I feel like I come from the corners that would say that having a custodial wallet is you know suboptimal that you know, that's not where we should be going excetera. How would you respond to the general criticism? Yeah. - self to value decentralisation of everything L many in that can be exactly on the maximalist to it's important above everything else to preserve Bitcoins decentralization as the base lab payment system, but when it comes to retail payments systems custodial Services can just do a better they just can just trade offs that have to be made when you decentralize things and in a real time, you know Merchant sort of style payment system or wallet payment system. I mean you sure you still use your Visa card to buy things. I do it works really well and the problem that Bitcoin Souls is not necessarily the problem of retail payments systems of getting fast reliable cheap payments for merchants and for consumers the problems ourselves are far more important than just a pains and systems are a dime a dozen but worked on them in the past you can Intellect will be kind solves the problem of sound money and appropriate access to that pain system so that anybody can use it. So don't feel bad about about using a custodian services like wallet of Satoshi because I mean it's not designed to be used the same way as Bitcoin. You should definitely be using a hardware wallet some other storage system to secure your own Sovereign money, but if you just find coffee of the shop then You know a custodian or wallet is a good trade-off to make honestly it is. I mean, I would probably agree with you and to be honest most of the times I try to get a complete newbie, you know into lightning or into Bitcoin. I would probably use wallet of Satoshi to get them in there just because it is just such an easy kind of onboarding and all that and I to be honest, I actually use it as a way of getting money on to the lightning Network. You know, we have spark swap now and we have Olympus coming. Zap at some point the previous to that I would very often just send you know Bitcoin directly from cash app to wallet of Satoshi just because then it's up. It's on Lightning. It's a very small fee to get it on their smaller than the on chain fee that I would pay if I was sending out my own transaction, but let me take a quick detour here. How would you kind of characterize the ethos of Bitcoin like what are the most important things to kind of protect overall here? Yeah. If you just came in to roll and read the white paper as some people do some of those old coins, you would think that it's retail payment system. That's what it's good for but over the years we've seen what it would prove truly is useful for and it's that's that's censorship resistant money this new kind of money that has never been possible in history before. I mean, it's easy to forget how different this technology I was earning book generating Kazaa back in the early 2000s and you'd have no Britney Spears MP3 It's a digital asset. If you could be copied and companies try to implement drh, protects digital assets like those MP3's but people always found a way around it. So the real value of Bitcoin is to create these digital assets that can't be forged and that's perfect for censorship resistant. Any and a safety net is kind of explained really well to us in this book. It's also sound like the kind of money that has ever existed before it's more like gold in that. It's not subject to the policies of any particular government is the international currency and its replacement for central bank money. So the properties that we need to preserve are exactly those wants that it needs to be to remain sound money and it needs to remain an Open Access system 2 has you know, one of the Problems that I have as building a company's getting access to the financial system and you simply can't do it. If you even if you're making a payment company, you cannot get access to those rural payment rails. You have to rely on a bank or some other payment provider to just get access to the system and then you're subject to the whims of that oftentimes a private company goes bankrupt private companies whether you're allowed to access the system on on but Bitcoin, In changes that because any person any company can get direct access to the system if they want to and they can choose how much trust they putting the parties to get access to some more if they want to do it with Stills. So they're the key things that need to be protected. You've been calling in life. You got it. So on my previous episode they came out yesterday actually when where listeners actually hear the still this will be in a few weeks ago the episode that I did with Shinobi. A big part of the episode was kind of using Bitcoin and you know using it on things that are currently illegal and whatever jurisdiction you might be in so, you know a big use case for Bitcoin might be Silk Road. What do you think about that general idea I guess. So then those rules aren't built into the protocol, but they can be separately forced by by governments by whoever wants to do that. But those things definitely shouldn't be part of the protocols. I was interested to listen to Shinobi actually when yours podcast yesterday because there's this also this small trend of people falling for a smaller box size. Is something I've had in the back of my mind for a long time actually Luke Jr. Was obviously the first person to actively promote it and to get heavily derided for even promoting the idea and Nick Szabo came along in his podcast and talked about it again interestingly Shinobi mentioned it yesterday, but I really, you know, as a business owners uses Bitcoin. This is one of the most important things to me preserving those properties so that we can do As layer 2 networks. It's lacking networks. Don't work at all without preserving those properties in Malayalam Network. And if we want to preserve those properties then a small block size kind of makes sense. We shouldn't be using it as a payment system. We should be using it as a trust system as something that's expensive and solid and you know can't be compromised. What do you think about that got it? So yeah, I'm still on the fence about small blocks. I'm technical but I'm probably not technical enough to really assess the truth value. So I'm withholding my opinion at this point, I think but I definitely find it fascinating at the idea of being able to transmit entire blocks over a shortwave radio and things like that making it a little bit more cypherpunk whenever possible sounds like a good thing at least in principle. I think it's interesting to me that we have. We have oh points, you know, I think they do a lot of damage to people who are new to the space about what Bitcoin is really all about. But they also serve a very useful purpose in that we can see practically what the results are from choosing different policies on followed protocol level big Point cash for example has a larger block size because ins V has an even larger block size and we'll be able to see Practical way what happens when we do those things. We'll see them in blue. And so that's useful because it just highlights how important it is to preserve the properties of Bitcoin protocol. And if you don't have those in any of the currently issue solution now just don't work and in my opinion any future second layer protocol that we want to build will have to rely on those fundamental. He's as good client. So, you know, maybe small block size is a good idea. Okay, I can definitely see the argument there. Let me just Riff on what you just said there. So, you know, we had Bitcoin cash we have Bitcoin at the do you think that in Practical terms that they've already imploded or are they going to implode kind of far more in the future, but I think those kind of decisions and the consequences are The people just start from the nice anymore. So Bitcoin cash there are fewer. No users. Even when you take into account the size of the network configuration SP. I mean their plan is to for you know, only two or three large players on Earth will be running forwards. Once you do that sort of thing you immediately lose the Centrist resistant Ability Network. So it's good to theorize about what what might happen but In these old coins, we can see it happening and you know fuck up their assumptions. Do you think that there is any old coins out there that is doing anything interesting in your estimation building interesting things. Different properties to alter or modify it. I mean like Congress has spoken about often to and they often Implement proposed revisions in Bitcoin like seaweed for example, and that's kind of very useful to see how it works with real-world money before it goes like so as a test net for Bitcoin, I think there's all kinds have some value. I just wish people wouldn't put so much money into them and they will cause a lot of confusion in the market that they I do but I don't know what the solution is the let people get wrecked and figure these things out from scratch as I think that maybe that's it. Do you see any interesting features coming to Bitcoin in the short term at the protocol level? I mean that this is a few things proposed a fundamental changes make anything drastically different and there's no plan to turn it into a retail payment system. Which I'm really happy about that that shouldn't be the focus of the valuable space in the blockchain. It should really be the focus of making it as as much as possible trust machine that we can rely on to build other things on top of and I mean, that's what I've been doing ever since I've known about Bitcoin building stuff on top of it and seeing just where the limits are and what the trade-offs are and there's trade-offs wherever you coming even whitening is a trade-off. It's an amazing technology. It's amazing. A muse of the Bitcoin blockchain but their trade up some problem in you have to look up liquidity to be able to use it which is kind of way using a service like well, it is Satoshi make some sense. I mean, you're basically paying us to be a liquidity provider a very small amount. Of course we serve as that accredited provider to the market and let me let you just do the fast payments we handle the rest. But yeah, all of these layer two technologies will have Laughs there's no Silver Bullet fix everything. So yeah, let's go ahead and come back to wallet of Satoshi here. So when you were developing that did you run into any challenges or anything that you know, lightning Network itself kind of made more difficult learning that clip was surprisingly mature, and I just honestly people talk about routing problems liquidity problems, but if you have a well man, Which know like we obviously do with plenty of liquidity the routing kind of takes care of itself. We have a very very low percentage of sale. Hey, that's something of the order of 0.1 percent which is amazing, you know for such a new technology and it's mostly to do with the size of pasta chat channels can be and I think channel is going to increase in size over time which will make services. As even more reliable understood their the one thing that I'm vaguely aware of is that you're in Australia are kind of using wall of Satoshi and living room of Satoshi in concert in order to build a circular economy. Is this correct? Yes true. Unfortunately. We just can't scale to the world. At the moment, we've got the ability to onboard people directly from feed into lighting a wallop Satoshi. So if you're in Australia will see an extra tab where you can just send money to and it'll show up and balance and it'll be indispensable to which is really cool because the payment systems in Australia are getting better as well. We have some real-time payment options for you so you can basically get out of your dirty secrets. Immediately into lightning and start using a straight away, which is really cool. Another thing. We've tried to work on is exploring point-of-sale systems as well. So we partnered up with a company called travel by bit Australia who do basically flights and hotel bookings with Bitcoin. They're worth using to check them out if you can but we built a system with them retail point of sale system for merchants to use just To explore the technology there see how useful it will be when previously done it with Bitcoin and I mean it kind of worked but lightning solves a lot of problems that customers just retail payments because of the instance that one instance settlement for the merchant or in this case instance settlement Philip payment provider the merchant space. That's really what you need. You need fast instant settlement, especially when you're dealing with a currency like Bitcoin, which Still pretty volatile. So I was quite excited to see how that's been going. We've got about 250 of those brick and mortar retailers around Australia - mostly in places like airports where we get a lot of international Travelers who can use lightning obviously coffee shops and gift shops and that sort of thing. So that's been interesting to explore and the benefit is that you know, even though wallets Toshi is how sturdy you'll system and the point of sale system is A custodian system for processing payments on behalf of merchants. Both of those things have direct access to the payment that work in terms of different being real lightning systems. So any lightning bolt works with a plant cell system and conversely you can use water to associate with any proposed point of sale system with anyone else fellas. And that's a huge change. That's a huge improvement over the current system. Where The motion has to be a Visa Merchant. Any the customer has to have a basic guard. Otherwise, they just won't work. So sometimes you lose track of even though these systems are still custodial. They're solving huge problems for merchants of retail payments. Yeah, we've seen that demonstrative with our systems has there been a lot of customer adoption at those merchants of lightning at all? No, no hits. Still very much an experimental sort of thing. We probably get a few transactions per diet each motion of the most and I mean that's a function of how many people actually need to go through airports. And we don't do a lot of promotion of a diva, but it's there and it's working and if it's something that people find useful it's getting a little bit of use of the moment. It's not blowing any - that's for sure but like with all things up trying to do we got to build these Technologies. Don't see very cozy. I don't know who lightning is useful for at the moment. I really don't all I know these that it's useful for me as a business owner to get instant settlement payments. I know that it's he's potentially useful purchase to get instant settlement of Bitcoin because that's something that's very important in the merchant space when it comes to other users. I don't know we're still exploring and see where it goes and building wallow Satoshi is one of those explorations to give us some data and find out what it's used for. Okay, understood, you know while on the same topic of a closed loop or circular economy. I kind of wanted to ask about living room of Satoshi here like a bill pay service, you know, maybe similar to bold Bitcoin in Canada where you can pay as as far as I know most bills with Bitcoin, so maybe even paying rent with Bitcoin. Is that right? That's right. Yes. Quite interested so that probably about two years at this point maybe a bit more. I've been living, you know, almost exclusively on Bitcoin in some sense. One of the biggest things was paying rent. So it's very interesting how at least in Australia you address that do you think the the payment system the Fiat payment system in Australia is unique in that sense. I have I'm not very acquainted with it. Just being in the US and all yeah must be most people can use immediately. I'm pretty jealous of that because it's here in the US. I'm you know, trying to beg my landlord. Like, please please, you know, please take this Bitcoin thing. Usually it just doesn't make sense. You know, let's say they supported coinbase. Or you know bitpay, you know, either of them would probably take a 1% fee if not more and if you're paying like $1000 rent, let's say, you know that can you know add up to be, you know, a good amount of you know, like 10 bucks or something and I'm a cheapskate. So I'm not really into the whole thing on your service. You know, is there any fee that's kind of added on top to just the the bill itself. We just charge you. All right spread basically. People tend to use it for things like rent payments. I think what we're still missing is more of the accounting side of you know, in your case. I mean for our service it's good because the person receiving the payment doesn't even have to know about Bitcoin and they can easily our accounting systems the same way exact same way. They normally do but if your landlord Is to receive Bitcoins directly that is still a huge headache for you just in terms of accounting apart from anything else practical about being able to convert to Theodore storing in some way. The accounting thing is a headache and I've even noticed this when trying to support open source Bitcoin projects, I can't name anyone in particular but even some of the big Point open source projects can accept payment in just because of the accounting headache man of any good accounting tools for being able to receive be kind of alone and I've been looking in the space to see if anyone's going to address this. Have you seen any good Solutions yet? Think once that kind of thing happens, it'll be easier for sellers landlords most for people to accept Bitcoin. I mean does it mean them definite the tax implications very clear in most jurisdictions. Now, I know they are in Australia, so there's no problems there. It's more just Being able to run the business and keep your all your accounting records in some sort of sensible. But what water away it's still very hard to do that. So you're saying that the the tax payment things a little bit straightforward for you there in the US that's not straight forward at all. But do you want to like share you know how things work down there and thankfully things have been regulated. 2014 Australia decided to add a goods and services tax to bitcoin just like a V8 e which essentially meant that you're paying double tax on everything basically killed our business and chilled every other Bitcoin company in Australia about Sage lot of them moved overseas to be able to continue. Operating thankfully they reverse that decision to couple years later to you know, we all got together as an industry and tell them that this is just stupid and since then that have been a lot more accommodating to our opinions about about trying to explain how Bitcoin works so they don't do that sort of thing again, even this morning I was talking to someone from treasury. They're looking to make regulations about about the whole cryptocurrency space and the industry oceans are one source of data for that. But often they get co-opted by your cashed-up ico's and the like so it's kind of important to be that independent voice. So these people just try and explain the difference between Bitcoin and everything else. So they don't make any more of those stupid rules understood. I'm assuming you pay capital gains tax on Bitcoin in that sells there as well. Yeah. That's right this nice special rules for Bitcoin specifically apart. From an exemption I brought in a couple of years ago about a tenth of a thousand dollars yearly limit if you use it in a retail sense, you know, if you're just using it to buy your coffee or pay bills or whatever then it's exemption in that case. So that's been good for adoption in Australia to oh, so that's something that's already on the books then. Yes. That's right that's been operating for about two years. That's very interesting. I really wish we had a couple of those laws. Laws in the u.s. That would make things so much simpler Beyond regulatory things here. I'm kind of curious, you know, you plan to grow these these businesses, you know, living room with Satoshi and wallet of Satoshi at all. We have that plants in the bus to do that. The problem is that these are very regulatory heavy kind of systems to be playing in kind of comes to payments governments all have their own individual rules and countries as you know, and you really have to be a local expert to be able to Expand and some companies have the capacity to do that and they're trying but it's still a huge cost on lawyers and trying to understand all the regulations. So I mean, well, it is Satoshi. As I said, it's more of an experiment at the moment. We know that this is a far better way to do payments and we want to explore exactly what we can do with it. One of the best things I've seen about it is that it makes use of the fact that Bitcoin is an international currency and So you can hop on a plane and go anywhere and you can use it and functions kind of like the money in a Fiat money payment system pretty close to it anyway, and that's something that just hasn't been possible of Bitcoin before so I'm excited to see that what else we'll see. I don't know got it. Let me ask you this good weather be anything that if you could wave a magic wand that you would just start doing tomorrow in terms of you know, the the business, you know something that might just be too much of a regulatory burden at the moment maybe. I mean we went through the lengthy process about two years ago in Australia to become a fully regulated financial services company. So there's something called a financial services license in Australia. So previously, you know cryptocurrency related company has ever attempted before we finally got through that process and it was a huge expense and burn definitely not worth it. Tons of monetary value for us but I think it kind of helped helped out the whole industry. In fact that we are the first ones to do it. You know it set the precedent Now The Regulators know a bit more about how it works the insurers getting familiar with it. We paid a huge premium here. He is a professional Indemnity insurance. So I guess more than anything I'd like Regulators to back off and wait a little bit longer because once you start setting Galatians that apply in ways that you don't anticipate and that's been our experience for the last five or six years. We've fallen into categories that really don't apply to us, but the rate regulations already written so we have to okay understood there, you know, I am familiar with maybe only a couple Australian Bitcoin things. You know, I'm aware of Amber. I'm aware of Stephen lovera, you know his podcast and everything. Is there any other major Bitcoin companies or Bitcoin things and Leah that people should be aware about well, you've already got the cream right? Someone else hasn't been pushed to its limit yet and we haven't seen how useful it is. Stop retail kind of spice you from that. Yeah, you pretty much covered everything everything else in the stratasys can pretty much just stay away from Beloit College room. And yeah, well the otherwise he is chemist. Okay under the makes a lot of sense you could have mentioned retail payments and kind of merchants adoption several times here something that's come up multiple times and previous podcasts has been the idea that you know, Bitcoin might end up getting And you know the base chain a Bitcoin might end up getting fees that are like a hundred dollars per transaction. If this ends up being the case, do you think it's going to fundamentally change how you run your business? He's going to like that and it means to be that that Brock solid reliable base layer that we can build things on top of. Got it. So I mean do you think the same argument can be made about lightning at some point that the transaction fees are so large that it makes it very difficult to even open up a lightning Channel at the moment are very valid used tests may be the only values taste both usage of Bitcoin Block Chain of moment. I mean, I have a look at some of the chance that I've opened on my nodes. And we're getting up to 10,000 payments for example in some cases some of those channels and that's all for the price of one on chain Bitcoin transaction. So the scale is just tremendous how much data it's taking away from the Bitcoin blockchain and putting into lightning and as he said Lightnings not the end game either purely just start. It's one of multiple options things could be built on top of lightning. We could have alternative layer two solutions that anchor it into the block the Bitcoin blockchain periodically, and I think that there's enough smart people around to come up with solutions for how to minimize the impact of that data on the Bitcoin blockchain that we we don't have to worry about ever extend the size of the coach of the block size question is how do you handle channels? Do you guys have some kind of like automated script that you use or is everything done manually, that's a good question. So we've got a few different notes running at the moment, but one primary know I guess. Which is running on LED Charlie, we have couple of other implementations though Channel management hasn't really been an issue for us because we've had enough equity to try to handle any use case that we currently have but I can see that it's going to be a problem because manually managing these channels and there are some smart people coming up with solutions for these things. That's it. There's a few scripts that are available to balance channels and that's the link the guy from lightning gifts is working on this. Ation for channel balancing which is pretty exciting more in a software-as-a-service sort of way. So that's something that could be useful to business owners who run lighting those who don't want to learn all the technical side of it after manage that simple things ourselves. But as I said, there's lots of smart people in this space who are going to come up with services for like that. We can take advantage of when a channel on your end ends up getting pushed to the remote side. How do you guys use rebalance that currently we just do it manually if we need to we'll make that going payment in that channel directly, but it's more just having enough liquidity overall nice efficient outgoing liquidity is sufficient income liquidity that the lightning Network note implementation basically takes care of its pretty clever. It'll find a route as long as you have that going acquittee somewhere do you open? A lot of channels or do you close a lot of channels which basically really close channels is no real need for us to do that. Can we just keep them open for some extra liquidity? We open channels? Yeah, manually, when if we see that this a lot of usage, for example, we get new Services popping up from time to time and people want to try them out and hits and very heavily and so in those cases worthwhile for us to open a channel directly to them just so that yeah things don't get too unbalanced. But it's the sort of thing that a computer or a script needs to do definitely and could do much better than me manually looking at what we need a topic that I bring up kind of constantly on this podcast is the idea of onboarding users directly to lightning and skipping over Bitcoin itself. Do you have any particular opinion on that kind of tactic upon boarding users? I think it's a good thing. I think most and uses my interested in using as payment system. And that's why we've built in that field option into other Satoshi first-round customers at least so they can go directly into a lightning balance without needing to touch the Bitcoin blockchain at all. And I think in the vast majority of cases That's what people want. They want to be able to send and receive coin easily and onboarding directly to Lightnings is the perfect way to do that. Do you think that there is any kind of trade-offs for doing it? That way that potentially they made they might end up, you know picking up bad habits or anything like that. No the opposite. They get a lightning balance instantly a bullet of Satoshi so they can send it out instantly. It's not like it's locked up any way. They can also send directly to a Bitcoin address if they want to it's kind of hidden feature in politics and social justice can any Bitcoin address and do an instant conversion? I think people are gonna start to get used to the idea that because lightning network is so liquid and liquid it is improving all the time that they can think of it as being Bitcoin, and I think that's a bad thing. Okay, I would probably agree with that. Do you think that ultimately those users should be you know, running a Bitcoin full node and maybe a L&D node in order to you know have the most control over their you know, their lightning and unchain funds. I think one of the amazing things about this technology is that people have the option to do that if they want to and I don't think getting new users to run for Bitcoin note or lightning load is useful to them in any way. I need a much gentle introduction to bitcoin and that's something well, it's totally does as they become more sophisticated uses perhaps using it to save money or to build a business then definitely they need to be able to run that those kind of software and that's precisely why we need to preserve the properties of the main Bitcoin blockchain so that it doesn't get bloated. It's still an option for people to run easily and the businesses don't Outsource. Two other people that they do it all themselves. Do you think that there is anything you know technologically that's coming up in lightning that interests you and thing kind of propels this whole game forward question Almost sure. I think one thing that we could do pretty soon is to increase the size of the channels because we're using lightning and Wall of Satoshi and that's mostly is the small payments at the moment, which is awesome. Not even sub Satoshi payments, but we're also using it a living room situation. People are starting to pay real bills with them. So, you know, you know $100 you four hundred dollar bills six hundred dollar bills and that kind of stretches our liquidity when it comes to lightning because just because of the limit of Channel size and if everyone's confident enough to do that, I think that people will start using it for larger paintings like those bills Services. That's a big Improvement because that's bill payments with settlement for a company like mine that takes a lot of risk out of it and it's for anyone using it liking to pay bills and takes the risk out of him too. Okay, and then I'm going to circle back around here. No pun intended to the circular economy thing again. How do you think you know, maybe on a more Global basis? I know your product kind of addresses that and Australia, but how do you think maybe more on a global basis? Do we address the issue? Was you know not having easy ways of paying various bills in Bitcoin, you know do people just get used to you know, dumping to Fiat and paying the normal people in Fiat or should X y&z happen in order to address this. That's a good question. I mean when I started Living Room Satoshi, my initial plan was to put myself out of business to get people so used to the idea of using Bitcoin that they don't need to use third-party payment processes. To do it for them and I think lightning helps with that just because you know, it's possible for anybody to be a payment processor. Now, you don't have to have any ideas of the party if you don't want to so I'll be keenly watching people in other countries to see how they're using it if they kind of copy our model and eventually get the merchants and sellers so used to the idea of Bitcoin that a bitch to comes more natural for them. And is there anything that You know, maybe non businesses or non companies could do to get you know more people into the circular economy or to kind of start using Bitcoin in a living on Bitcoins right away. Yeah see lightning as a payment system and promoting it like that is maybe not the best way to do it because honestly fear Payment Systems pretty good, especially in countries like Australia going to any lightning wallet is going to be a step backwards for them potentially. Lee so it's more important than anything to educate people on the idea of why Bitcoin is different to Fiat money and why it's important for them and I think that honestly, I think that Financial crises and Global uncertainty about what's happening in central banking system is just going to do that for us people who start start again realize what Fiat money is all about and start to look at Bitcoin themselves. And if we have those products they're ready for you to use it'll be easy to avoid Got it. So I mean basically what you're saying is, you know, let people know about the sound money traits of Bitcoin and kind of let the rest to do its job. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, I guess in my experience I have difficulty getting people to understand the whole sound money argument. It tends to just fall apart like oh, okay. Cool Chaz had on your head a little bit and then they just stopped listening to nowt sort of thing. How do we get people to just listen to that initial argument? Well, it's got to address of vessel. I think that's some people especially ones who've retired and I particularly in Australia who have Savings in the bank and have seen interest rates dropping and they're just basically getting nothing anymore for the money that they have kind of prompts them to think about what this thing is that they've got and whether a really has any value so talking to people from that angle. I find that there are often curious to find out about what this Fiat money is that they're And why it's doing what it does and why central banks and making the decisions that they do. I mean q he's going to be a big thing. I see in the newspapers in Australia today that the Australian Central Bank has given up on reducing interest rates that are down to about 0.5 percent, but they're obviously scared about the effect the psychological effect that going to 0 will have on people going to to do more quantitative easing. So those are the things people are going to be Arrested in they're going to know about it and it'll be easier for them to understand. Why be quiet. I guess just in my own personal experience. It's you know, once you begin to have like a political or financial conversation with people they tend to tune out immediately. It's like, okay. I'm done kind of let's talk about Netflix or something and I'm moving on from there. I wanted to briefly ask. So I was looking at your website on living room of Satoshi, and I noticed you accept more than just Bitcoin. You also accept Other altcoins, do you want to let me know why that is? Yeah, that's I mean pain point for me we started with Bitcoin, but we need to address that market to manage people want to want to cash out these points. And so we're giving the option to do it. So if you want to dump all your old points that you know, living room satoshi's an easy way to do it getting straight in to see it will pay bills and have done hopefully over time those options. I mean, they will definitely because the market cap of these points is going down. I mean all our current and future development is on bitcoin and I'm guessing 95% of your the payments coming in or from Bitcoin or from Bitcoin laning. Is that right? Click on the settings page on our website. We publish that data for the last 30 days. So let me have a quick look now. So we got 61% payments with Bitcoin serving percent furion and lightning fourth place. So that's quite amazing for bill payments lightning is taking up all that ground such a short amount of time above Ripple Bitcoin cash being bhima narrowed. Ikra - three others. Do you think that there's any good argument against supporting these these particular coins or chains or what not again supporting them? Yes, what for me personally. Oh, yes. Yeah. Maybe there is it does add to that legitimacy aspect while it Joint makes people feel like they're in the same category. Maybe we'll work on altering the website to make it clear that they should be used. Of course with all that current customers would be to promote our product and was teaching programs and we're constantly doing media about lightning and about what it does how it works and how it can be useful for them to you know, you're saying that you know, you kind of advertise lightning, you know, generally on your website and I kind of got the vision of I'm not sure if you've seen the block stream satellite Twitter, but like a lot of people are using to troll with a fair amount of them or like be as V people or Ripple people using lightning in order to kind of insult lightning or insult bitcoiners. Do you think that there's a fair amount of people that are you know, maybe using altcoins primarily on your service that are you know, looking at lightning and are getting sold into it do you mean - having an effect on bsv as because they can see that it actually works basically, maybe you're like, you know grumbling to themselves about it. But yeah, I mean, there's still a lot of misinformation around about whitening and less Community such try and stay away from them as much as I can. I mean the proof of the pudding is in the eating we've got this product that works these elope. It seems to settlement and it doesn't affect the Bitcoin blockchain doesn't compromise any of Those properties that we need to preserve. So I mean it really demonstrates itself. Where do you see Bitcoin lightning and the whole ecosystem of Bitcoin being and maybe 10 years. Do you see it improving significantly? And fit systems are really bad at that. So that might be the first place where people see its utility and if people want to spend it when they're traveling moving around then motion Segundo accepted and especially companies are going to build on it because they can get direct access to the payment rails. So they're they're the places that I think you're going to develop first companies building directly on payment brailsford and after going through the like Banking pravesh and consumers who is an internationally. Alright, perfect. Well, do you want to go ahead and let our listeners know how they can find you and your business on the Internet or and on Twitter and whatnot. Yes, I can find me on Twitter Daniel Alexius. I'm involved in both living room Satoshi Molotov Satoshi. So try those out if you haven't. Okay, perfect. Well, I really appreciate you joining me on the lightning junkies podcast, Daniel. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Boom. That was a lightning strike of an episode. Hopefully you enjoyed that. For seishin and learn something too. I certainly did. If you did. In fact learn something once again, I would ask that you chip in a little bit of Bitcoin or Bitcoin over lightning. I'll my crowdfunding campaign crowdfund dot lightning junkies dotnet. There's also links to tipping dot me bottle pay and Ellen cast in the show notes as well earlier this month. So one was nice enough to donate 1 million sads to the pod. Cast this was enough to cover one month of costs and associated with running the podcast. So I really appreciate it. Just a throw it out there. I am generally open to Future sponsorships and order to monetize this podcast. I know I said on early episodes that I wouldn't do this, but I've definitely been having a change of heart and love to be able to do this show full time and be able to progress it. I've had ideas about integrating my previous career. You're as a photographer into the podcast. So the idea would be I would travel to where my podcast gets are or to meet them somewhere and also bring my photo Gear with me and take portraits that you know, I might have called edgy at one point in my life. If you want to reach out about sponsoring the podcast. You can reach me at Chaz at lightning junkies dotnet, but for now, I will leave things here and I will see you on the lightning. Network
This is the thirteenth episode of the Lightning Junkies podcast. In this episode we have Daniel Alexiuc from Living Room of Satoshi/Wallet of Satoshi, Living Room of Satoshi is an Australian service that allows Australians to pay their bills using Bitcoin and Bitcoin over Lightning. Wallet of Satoshi is a custodial Lightning wallet that allows you to do both on-chain and off-chain Bitcoin transactions. On this episode, we talk about:    Daniel's Background  Bitcoin Ethos  Wallet of Satoshi Being Custodial  Small Blocks  BCH/BSV/Altcoins  Lightning Network Challenges   Circular Economy   Living Room of Satoshi   Paying Rent with Bitcoin   Australian Tax Laws   Regulations   How are channels handled for Wallet of Satoshi? What's missing from Lightning? Arguments against supporting Altcoins   Onboard Altcoiners onto Lightning  Daniel Alexiuc's Twitter: https://twitter.com/danielalexiuc Living Room of Satoshi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/roomofsatoshi Wallet of Satoshi's Twitter: https://twitter.com/walletofsatoshi Living Room of Satoshi's Website: https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/ Wallet of Satoshi's Website: https://walletofsatoshi.com/  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 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 