Official Podcast Episode: https://www.stephanlivera.com/551
Ben Carman of Mutiny Wallet rejoins me on the show to talk about what’s coming next for Bitcoin. We talk about scaling Bitcoin and contrast the different mindsets, discuss different soft fork proposals and directions Bitcoin could go. We also talk about what impact covenants will have and the latest with Mutiny Wallet.
– Bitcoin’s biggest challenges
– Taxonomy of Bitcoin development culture
– Soft forks and covenants
– What ‘counts’ as a Bitcoin L2?
– What are the big benefits of covenants?
– Mutiny Wallet – a new Hybrid era?
– Will people get priced out?
– Fedimint support
– Synthetic USD or swaps?
– Inscriptions and Spam
Timestamp:
00:00 – Introduction
01:18 – Bitcoin’s Challenges: Scaling and Social Consensus
08:50 – Different Perspectives on Bitcoin’s Future
16:10 – The Importance of Unilateral Exit and Self-Custody
21:16 – The Potential of Covenants for Scaling Bitcoin
25:23 – Mempool.space
26:17 – Coinkite.com
27:37 – Bitcoin Ark – A Payment Pool
31:11 – Introduction to Mutiny Wallet
34:36 – Addressing Security Concerns
37:06 – Simplifying Onboarding and Social Features in Mutiny Wallet
41:50 – The Challenge of Scalability and Affordability
43:50 – Building a Hybrid Wallet with Fediment Support
45:50 – NomadCapitalist.com
47:50 – Swan.com
49:07 – Guardians and Discoverability in Mutiny Wallet
50:50 – Multiple Federation Support in Mutiny Wallet
55:25 – Stable Channels and Synthetic USD in Mutiny Wallet
01:00:20 – The Role of ETFs and Number Go Up in Bitcoin Adoption
01:04:40 – The Debate on Inscriptions and Shitcoins in Bitcoin
01:08:01 – Closing Thoughts
Links:
– Site: mutinywallet.com : https://www.mutinywallet.com/
– X: @benthecarman : https://twitter.com/benthecarman
– nostr: npub1u8lnhlw5usp3t9vmpz60ejpyt649z33hu82wc2hpv6m5xdqmuxhs46turz
– Inscriptions post: https://habla.news/a/naddr1qqxnzdesxgerxdp58yenyvejqgswrlemlh2wgqc4jkds3d8ueqj9a2j3gcm7r48v9tskdd6rxsd7rtcrqsqqqa28wdzn0j
Sponsors:
– Swan.com (code LIVERA): http://swan.com/livera
– CoinKite.com (code LIVERA): http://coinkite.com/
– Mempool.space: https://mempool.space/
– Nomadcapitalist.com : https://nomadcapitalist.com/
Stephan Livera links:
– Follow me on X @stephanlivera : https://twitter.com/stephanlivera
– Subscribe to the podcast: https://plinkhq.com/i/1415720320?to=page
– Subscribe to Substack : https://stephanlivera.substack.com/
Hi everyone you’re watching Stefan levera podcast brought to you by swann.com what’s next for Bitcoin we talk about various soft Fork ideas and development philosophies and ideas in Bitcoin and uh today I’m speaking with Ben Carmen from Mutiny wallet so he rejoins me to share some really interesting perspectives on bitcoin
Protocol development what are some of bitcoin’s biggest challenges uh soft Forks covenants what are some of the different categories of upgrades what counts as a coin layer 2 and of course we get into some discussion on what he’s working on which is Mutiny wallet we talk a little bit about whether this
Represents a new hybrid era for Bitcoin wallets I’m sure you’ll enjoy this discussion with Ben Carman Ben welcome back to the show thanks for having me again Stefan good to good to talk to you again it’s been a minute yeah it’s been a while lots of things happening I know you are plugging away working hard on Mutiny wallet as well as you know commentating on a few
Things happening in the space um yeah I had a chance to play around with Mutiny as well um we’ll get to that um but let’s let’s first start with talking a little bit about what you see as bitcoin’s biggest you know challenges on one side and opportunities on the other
Do you want to just start on the let’s start on the challenges side what do you see is some of the the challenges that we’re you know as an ecosystem that we’re facing yeah I mean I think it’s always been like even since day one it’s always
Been scaling like uh you know with there’s a famous post by howy where he’s like oh there’s going to be like a million Bitcoin Banks it’s like you know within a week he realized like okay we can’t just put everything on chain and then um for the last I don’t know
Lightning paper come out in like 2015 so almost like 9 years now people have been working on lightning and it’s been I mean lightning I think is a huge success but I think people are now kind of realizing it’s not just like you know this use lightning and it fixes
Everything um it’s a you know incremental solution and there’s more things we need to do and so I think a lot of people kind of realizing that in this last like year or two and um has evoked a lot of emotions I guess like some people are like oh we were sold a
Lie and like you know Bitcoin devs are liars and scammers versus the other half is like oh you know this is we all knew this already it’s just like you know welcome to reality kind of thing and then you know all of this is being compounded by like you know we’re trying
To like use the chain most efficiently and then you have the tap rot wizard guys just like putting 4 megabyte jpegs on chain and you know not caring at all and all this you know stupid stuff happen so it’s been a lot of fun in my
Opinion but it’s a uh it’s a show and uh I don’t I think basically we’re kind of coming coming to a head now like you recently had uh I forget his name like render code or something like that on uh Brandon to talk about all the
Softwork stuff or um stuff like that you know we’re trying to like I think the conversation now has kind of moved to like at least a lot of people are recognizing we do need maybe a soft Fork to try to like help these things but um there’s the other crowd of
Oasification stuff that doesn’t want to and all that stuff so I think a lot of our challenges is like almost more social than technical of just like you know we need to come to like a social consensus of like what’s the next move and you know it’s just politicking
Instead of like you know sadly not writing the code but you kind of figure out what exactly is the right code to write kind of thing so um that’s kind of hard but it’s you know slow and steady on the social element I want to put this
To you I think you’d have some interesting thoughts I saw uh and actually this is based shout out to Neil woodfine he had an interesting um I’m going to call it taxonomy of let’s say levels of you know what you want so he he had this kind of oifc view which is
Basically don’t change Bitcoin unless it’s like going to literally going to die then you had the kind of the conservatives who were sort of like you know we want some change but sort of slow and steady be safe about it then you had the kind of Bitcoin progressives the kind of
People who are like more radical about what changes they want and then you kind of had the sort of shitcoin people who are sort of like just want to enable anything and everything that enables you know shitcoins uh and you know related I’m curious do you sort of where do you
See that taxonomy do you think it’s accurate or inaccurate or do you have any comments on that yeah I saw that tweet I thought it was uh I thought it’s very accurate there’s like basically like those four camps like you have like the taper Wizards like let’s activate
Cat and this and that and it’s like those get scary if we activate all that stuff but yeah and then there’s the OIC CRS like don’t touch it at all like fix the filters like we have to fix our current stuff versus like uh I don’t I
Thought I see myself more in like the conservative maybe a little bit Progressive camp where I’m just like you know we definitely need some change and we can’t just like wait around for 10 years to like pick a change because you know Bitcoin you know if Bitcoin is
Worth like a trillion dollars tomorrow like softw work probably aren’t happening anymore it’s just just like being able to activate things just comes that much harder the bigger the system gets so I think like we do have a time limit on these things so I kind of leave
To the progressive sense in that case but like I don’t want to activate anything like you know we need to be somewhat targeted in what we activate but um yeah it is curious I think it it’s it comes like a lot of a like when you got into the Bitcoin thing cuz like
If you look at like the history of Bitcoin software CU there’s basically one every like 6 months to a year up until seg it was just a normal thing like oh new Bitcoin Court update there might be a soft Fork up in it now now
It’s like you know if you even open a poll request of Bitcoin core for soft Fork it’s like a news event which is like uh it’s very different based on the time so like you know if uh you know so it it makes a good question like you
Know is what second with the outlier like if we didn’t have this um blocksize war and all the history would we have just been having like you know still softw works every 6 months to a year up until now would we have like all these fancy things or was that like
Were we just being like naive children just activating random things and we got humbled during a segt and now we like learned we need to take these time you know it’s kind of a question everyone needs to ask themselves but I I I do think there’s a middle ground like I
Think like you know four years for every upgrade is kind of what we’re at now and that’s I don’t think that’s going to work if we uh go that slow because like I said there’s this time limit on on uh when we can activate things I think and
If we wait too long then it’s like then we’re you know all these softw Works we’re trying to make self- custody easier and cheaper and like you know more scalable for and users and if we like you know if we stop softw working today frankly like you know most users
Won’t be able to use self custodial self- custodial Bitcoin and then like you know that’s not the dream we want of Bitcoin and you know it can hurt its properties in the end where you know if everyone’s in centralized custodians then inflation can happen you know silent inflation and all that stuff but
You know it’s different things to think about but it it’s hard so I take it then you it sounds like you agree with let’s say R and code AKA Brandon black his view on if we don’t get say Covenant or maybe in the longer term future a block
Size increase that may restrict the number of people who can self- custody Bitcoin and therefore we should consider a covenant sof Fork is that basically where you’re at or how would you categorize yourself or how what you think there I think that’s just like the general understanding of most Bitcoin
Devs like um it’s like either that like either we we know like we can improve current systems by Soft Forks otherwise it’s like we basically just have to like invent completely new things out of the blue that no one’s thought of for the last 10 years like you know maybe
Something like bit VM enables like a trustless 2 aex side chain or something but like you know side chains still aren’t like really ways the scale it’s more just like pushing the uh you know it’s like kicking the can a little bit you’re just like creating another
Blockchain which is like you know the whole thing we’re trying to solve is blockchain on scale so like why are we creating more blockchains but um yeah it’s uh you know maybe some other fancy stuff comes out of the blue that we didn’t expect but you know at the end of
The day it’s like our current understanding is we kind of need softw works and you know if we’re just going to like sit on our hands just like waiting for someone to invent a new protocol on top of Bitcoin like it’s it’s not like a you know long-term thing
That’s just like hoping OPM kind of thinking so I don’t think that’s very advisable unless it’s just like you know if Bitcoin is just to just like I keep like my you know 10 Bitcoin and cold storage and I never touch it again like sure then you don’t care but like you
Know I hope the Bitcoin is like you know the currency that everyone uses it’s dayto day and to be able for people to transact like that we definitely need more scaling Solutions if we want to do it in a self self- custodial way yeah and so I guess there’s a few different
Categories of things people can talk about as you mentioned um the soft forks and people I guess talk about different categories and that’s that’s my understanding of it I’m curious to hear your understanding so let me just try to spell out some of the different categories I see people talking about
And we’ll see so I guess in one category you’ve got sort of the the block size increase or maybe the extension block kind of thing that’s kind of one way and maybe someone like John cavalo might be you know Pro block size increase maybe not now but in the future let’s say
Something like that um but of course that can also be controversial because people might be like hey if you raise the block size you’re just going to get more inscriptions and spam on the chain per se another category is let’s say covenants right so any prev out and
Check template verify or TX has or something in that category that allows you know a restraint on the next output is sort of the I guess the the category or the way uh reden code or Brandon explains that um and maybe in another category you’ve got this kind of ZK zero
Knowledge um either optimistic rollup or some kind of zero knowledge uh category I know someone like Lau from lightning Labs might be sort of a little more in favor of that idea um I’m curious how you’re seeing it like do you think that’s a you know or I guess to be fair there’s
Probably also people who maybe I’m not personally pro drive chain but there would be people who are pro drive chain as that approach so do you see those as kind of the main categories or do you see any other category what do you see there yeah I think that’s probably a
Good characterization of all the categories like yeah like you said there’s like the drive chain side chain people which we kind of now can kind of hopefully like say we don’t need soft for score cuz of all the bit VM stuff they can probably build it with that and
That’s similar to like the ZK rollup stuff as well like we had I think it’s called like citria they like made a PC or are working on a PC of a ZK rollup using bit VM so like you know in theory a lot of the stuff we can hopefully
Emulate those things without softw works and then you know if it’s like okay we created sria bit VM ZK rollup but it’s like terribly inefficient it can’t scale we could like you know then find soft Forks to make it better like similar to what we did with lightning where you
Know it didn’t work perfectly until we had like things like CLTV and stuff and that made it like a, text easier and then you know right now we have the similar thought of like you know let’s get APL or something to make lightning even easier um but yeah and then as well
There’s like the covenants which you know it’s kind of goal is like scale utxo ownership which um you know it’s kind of like in my opinion it’s like just the most like easiest transition of like you know we did all these sof Forks to basically enable lightning over the
Last few years and then um now we have lightning we’ve kind of scaled payments which works really well you know you open one channel you can do a billion payments close the channel and you know only two onchain transactions the problem is you know getting every single user lighting Channel doesn’t really
Work and these lighning channels need to be it turns out they need to be kind of big because on chain fees you know break different things and the lightning security model so you need to like be able to handle all those different fluctuations so kind of just ends up
Being just have a big Channel you kind of and then all those problems kind of hide away so um if we could scale utex ownership then we could have like these channels be you know almost shared among users or something and you can kind of have these different models where we can
Make lightning uh you know just basically lower the cost of lightning and that’s in general a good thing um and yeah the the last one is like more you know the fancy things like cat and all that and it’s like you know those are just almost like it’s like an
Undefined space almost like we know some things you can do with cat but like you know you can go Jeremy Ruben’s blog and read like the thousand different things he came up with of how like what to do with cat it’s like those are like almost
Too scary of like you know we enable this and next thing you know we have like who knows on you know someone’s playing uh you know doom on on bitcoin or something and yeah um one other area that’s interesting I want to get your view on there seems to be this let’s say
Explosion in the number of l2s but at the same time there’s been some debate about what counts as an L2 right because recently there’s been this kind of explosion of people who are calling themselves a Bitcoin layer too but then the question is some of these things
Kind of have their own token and then it sort of becomes like is this more like a side chain and it’s not truly an L2 that offers a unilateral exit in the same way that lightning does and arguably arguably State chains could maybe fit in that category also so maybe
Let’s say the people who are more strict about what is an L2 would say maybe you know just lightning maybe State chains and then there’s a lot of other people who are having a very let’s say expansive or permissive definition where they’re counting you know all kinds of
Things as a as an L2 for Bitcoin where do you stand on that kind of uh framing yeah there’s like you can take like the most extreme position and be like coinbase is an L2 because you deposit you can make internal transfers and then withdraw but like obviously that’s
Completely trusted so um yeah I disagree with that I think like I think the unilateral exit is probably the most agreed upon definition and makes the most sense you know if I always have a transaction I could broadcast give my money back um without any trust assumptions pretty much like that sounds
Good to me so that yeah things like State chains and um you know some like two aex side chains You Can Count into that I think lightning is kind of like almost a step better than that cuz like not like things like or something like Arc as well falls into that first
Category of like you know it’s a two-way Peg or not 2ay Peg it’s a you know you have this unilateral exit but the problem I think with like things like that is like you have you kind of need like an you need these asps in like
These side chains you kind of need like side chain like miners or validators and these like you know basically how you go in and out of them and um lightning is kind of beautiful where it’s like it’s a truly peer-to-peer Network where you know it started up with like five nodes
And people just connected to each other versus like if you wanted to start up like something like Arc you need to like basically find someone that’s willing to front the capital to start up like an arc service provider and like take it on as like almost a business venture it’s
Like really hard to start up as like a you know payments Network with needing requiring like service providers versus just like with lighting it’s kind of you can almost just bootstrap yourself with a couple channels which is like really really hard to replicate like that’s why
I think like lightning is doing so well is because like it’s kind of like the perfect idealist L2 of like there is like almost like we can improve the trade-offs of like online availability and all that kind of stuff but like on the actual decentralization of the
Network it’s like kind of unbeatable in that regard because there is no like service providers or anything like that it’s mostly like we use service providers to improve the ux it’s not service providers to like function the network which is like kind of a really different model than a lot of the other
L2s so I do hope we can improve either like improve lightning and make it even better or you know if we’re going to come up with the new scaling solution L2 kind of thing I hope it can have the properties of lightning in that regard because I think like having these
Service providers required for in L2 is like not ideal and it’s um you know it’s not the ideal that we could have in the future and we’re trying to make Bitcoin this decentralized perfect thing you know we should strive for that ideal but you know it is a lot harder to do so
We’ll see if that actually happens but yeah yeah and I think it’s probably fair to say there’s there’s like this sort of level of gradations right so from like Bitcoin you know in your multisig in your cold storage versus maybe Bitcoin single Sig then lightning and then maybe
You got like State chains and maybe some of these other ideas that are you know to and then maybe you’ve got liquid somewhere in there and then you’ve got just like custodial exchange at the at the very end right you’re just fully trusting somebody maybe Fint is
Somewhere um somewhere there but I guess that’s sort of the the Spectrum we’re dealing with and I guess the way jako was talking about it recently is sort of you’re trying to push people towards one side but you know that at least today we know that not everybody can go on chain
Because as you said we can scale payments with lightning but we can’t necessarily scale users who can self- custody or unilateral exit right um so I guess that’s that’s where we stand for now right yeah yeah exactly so you know it’s basically like figuring out like do
We try to scale ownership with lightning which is like what a lot of the different proposals are kind of right now or it’s like do we just like say like lightning is a bridge for these other l2s we’re going to build like that’s kind of like the arc or like
Fedman approach of like you know let’s build these alternate systems and we just Bridge them all together with lightning and you know maybe we do have these service providers but it’s permissionless so anyone can be a service provider so it’s not like centralized or anything and but it’s you
Know it’s still not that a perfect ideal everyone has their perfect self custody but you know if if you know if 90% of users have unilateral exit like that’s a pretty good World way better than this world so um I’d still be happy but you know my ideal is hopefully we get
Lightning to be able to scale to everyone but you know it’s going to be a lot harder yeah so look put it this way let’s say of the currently available proposals if you had a magic want Ben common got a magic want to uh pick a
Soft fork or a let’s say a current proposal today if you had to pick one what would you pick oh man I don’t want this power um I don’t know I would probably pick I I’m really getting convinced by the Len enhance proposal I think that’s um really tactical where he’s like
Basically took all the things of APO and emulated them with CTV um plus some other stuff and I think that’s kind of beautiful and it’s like kind of giving us the best of both worlds and it looks like we could probably take CTV and like basically upgrade it in the future to
Something like TX has so I think that could be quite beautiful um but yeah I mean who knows maybe tomorrow someone comes out with another coven’s proposal so yeah it’s there’s a lot of different things when flux is the problem like you know a lot of these
There’s like basically like a two month period or like maybe like six month period like a few years ago where basically like every week we’d get a new covenant proposal on the Bitcoin mailing list and I was like okay like I guess there’s an infinite way number of to do
These things so now it’s like it’s there’s kind of settled on like five different options we have like CTV TX uh mer all the things there’s um people like emulate it with opcat and then there’s like APO as well it’s like it’s like all these different things all
Their different trade-offs and like you know it’s it’s kind of weird like what to pick for the tradeoff like we could do cat and have like basically infinite functionality now but it’s like way less efficient on chain but then the argument is like who cares about the efficiency
Like people are inscribing jpegs like you know we don’t why do we care but um you know obviously want to reduce the cost and stuff so things get better with like CTV and T TX hash but then you enable too much uh functionality maybe or like too complex and all that stuff
So I think Allen Hance kind of picks a perfect Middle Ground of the current proposals right now but like you know if I had to like wave of magic if I like if I was given this power I don’t know i’ would actually use it because it’s
That’s scary and like you know maybe maybe you know a week for now something that BS comes up better but we’ve already you know kind of made that soft fork and now getting consensus for another one is going to be that much harder so it is hard but yeah yeah and
So I guess out of let’s say those categories that we spoke about before right zero knowledge staff you know extension blocks or block size increase covenants you you sort of are veering mostly towards the covenants you think that’s probably the most fruitful Pathway to go is that what your view is
Yeah definitely like I think like like I said like covenants give us the most likely way to have that like perfect like decentralized unilateral exit you know no service provider needed kind of thing thing um and like block size increase I think it’s like we we already
Beat that horse to death like that’s not going to happen and uh probably not even a good thing and like the ZK rollup stuff like I don’t know like the shitcoin space like really uses that stuff a bunch but like if you talk to them they’re like yeah it’s like
Basically one validator running the whole thing it’s like not like it’s basically just like kind of throwing tons of fancy math in front of regulators that be like Oh I’m definitely decentralized when it’s actually not so um regulatory Arbitrage play exactly exactly like like all of
The coins are so um I I don’t actually like put too much Credence on those I if someone could like pull off a real like a real decentralized version of one that’d be great but you know I’ll I’ll you know I’m waiting to see it kind
Of thing yeah okay so let’s if we’re talking in the realm of covenants what do you see as the big you know what are the big levers here what’s going to really move the needle is it things like non-interactive channels or cold channels or is it um congestion control
Or you know or I know there’s a covenant impact on DLCs what what do you see as the like what are we really hoping for with covenants yeah I mean I think like the the dream is like kind of like the payments pool idea where basically like
Basically a bunch of people enter into like a pool and now they like all share one dxo and they’re able to make transactions within each other like seamlessly and then they can you know bridge that to lightning and stuff as well and uh I think that’s kind of the
Dream cuz like it gives you like not only like amazing like scalability but like extremely good privacy properties where like you know there’s you basically don’t need the coin joint anymore because everything is inside of a coin joint it’s but it’s inside a utxo not a giant transaction so it becomes
Like you know basically breaks all the models for like all the scaling problems and all the Privacy problems of Bitcoin but you know it is a dream it’s like there there’s no real true proposal of how to do that yet in a easy way without like either like a million soft Forks or
Like super complex State machines and stuff that’s going to be hard to operate and you know different Online requirements and all that stuff so it gets like really hard but in theory if we could do it that’ be the dream so I think like moving towards that is the
Best possible and yeah I think like Step One is kind of like okay we have no way to share utxo with users besides multi sick which requires an always online compliance so let’s just you know activate some sort of Covenant that gives us you know the ability to share
Utxos um trustless Le and that would like give us a a huge upgrade and functionality and I think I I know I feel like just having some sort of covenants will not well like will enable all these things that we’ve like people have been researching for years and have
Ideas of but I’m guessing that’s going to expire you know new developers to come up with brand new things somewhere like you know we talked about tap rot for basically like 6 years or something the kind of the core ideas and you know two or 3 years after Tapo has been
Activated bit BM came out on accident it’s like whole new functionality that no one thought was possible I think you know covenants will probably end up having a similar kind of thing of like oh we were going to share utxos and turns out it enables you who knows some
Crazy thing and um it’s just like a small primitive that gives actually like a ton of like new possibilities like I mean like you brought up the dlc’s thing it’s like like that’s like you know a super small thing but reduces the cost of DLCs by like you know a million x
Basically of just like you know you no longer just store a million signatures and verify the signatures you just you know get generate the same address and you’re done like it’s so much easier so I do think like things like that could like really Elevate what’s possible next
And like I think we activated like something like CTV or the full thing of like Len hands like we’ll have like you know now like 5 10 years of work worth of work to do of like you know getting lightning and all these different protocols up to date with like the
Latest and greatest and in that meantime a ton of new research is going to happen with those New Primitives and people find even uh you know new things and we’ll have a new path of like okay we did see TV and now we know that like
This is the next move like like you know if you think back to in like 2016 or 17 like when seg activated we we knew like okay lightning is starting it’s barely working kind of thing and there’s I think I don’t know if when the L2 paper came out maybe like
2018 19 there’s like some ideas of like okay we can make this better and now like you know almost 10 years later since lightning started we have like all these different ways to improve lightning that we know but we just you know know have to like pick one now and
I think like the same thing’s going to happen where it’s like the ideas are just kind of starting to form and once we actually play with them in the wild like we’ll really get all those ideas out and then have a clear path forward but like if we just sit around picking
One thing that’s going to be perfect it’s we’re not going to actually you know you have to kind of like Get users get um some like you know testing in the real world and feel like okay this is the real problem not this and have a
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Payment pools as well I guess probably also interesting to point out here that Ark kind of is a payment pool right I mean there’s some elements of payment pool in arkc but maybe the main downside as most people see there is the very high Capital requirement for
Asps uh I guess that’s probably the main downside with would you say or do you see other downsides here yeah yeah Arc is yeah actually Arc is like kind of part of that dream like it it is like basically a payment pull like you put it you deposit in and it’s like basically
You’re just like kind of transacting within the system unless you and and you can do like lightning payments out of it and everything it kind of gives you that dream the problem is like you know it’s you have these giant asps that to do transactions like every few seconds to
Like bring down the transaction latency for the payments within and it like that like really blows the chain like ton of onchain payments and has you know you have these requirements for this giant ASP that you know it’s not only the capital but then like you know server up
Time all this stuff and it’s like you know maybe we could somehow figure out how to Federate it and stuff like that but that’s you know even more complicated so who knows but yeah I think Arc would be awesome to have and like I think there’s a way to do it
Today but it’s like kind of unusable for like end users because of the Online requirements and stuff but um if we did have like something I think I think it needs CTV and then you can like kind kind of do like the the really nice
Version of Arc but uh yeah I mean that that’s another thing it’s like you know we can talk about Arc all day but it’s like unless you know unless someone like you know puts arc on a mobile app like we’re not really going to know how well
It works until like someone does that because you know just like facing reality is like the best way to figure out if your thing works or not like we can’t we can draw on a whiteboard all day but who knows if it actually works yeah and the other point around
Simplicity uh not the softwalk to be clear Simplicity in general what we’re talking about here is you know people like you and I and let’s say listeners of this podcast will probably be more techsavvy or at least interested and so we might be interested to talk about some of these ideas but in
Practice what happens on the you know rubber meets the road there needs to be you know an app there needs to be something that people can actually use right there needs to be signal so that people can use encrypted chat and not expecting everybody to be using pgp and
Like being a hacker man right obviously you and I understand that but then maybe that’s something where you know it really has to be made productized and simple enough that you know everyday user can just use an app otherwise it just becomes like a bunch of nerds all Theory crafting about some hypothetical
System that is not actually being used and cannot actually be used yeah I mean even further it’s like uh you know we could like like we’ve been talking about things like CTV APO it’s you know like there’s a bunch of Bitcoin app tabs that have no idea what these mean or like you
Know they can they kind of have an idea like oh okay that enables this but like you know it’s really like you know it’s almost the the softwork devs have to convince like the then like the lightning protocol devs who have to convince then the end app devs who then
Convince the users like there’s these all these layers of like kind of convincing and like productizing and stuff so like you know like there’s lots of like lightning devs are like I don’t really want CTV like I think M car has been a lot of uh talking against it he’s
Like I want to get rid of like these properties of lightning not those properties of lightning and stuff like that so you know there’s lots of different trade-offs everyone wants to make and uh it’s it’s hard so yeah there’s all these steps of like new the apps just like users complain about this
I want to get rid of this and there’s a protocol that like this part’s annoying of the protocol I want to get rid of this and you know everyone has to kind of like find that middle ground of like where where are we actually going to
Target and try to fix things yeah so let’s now get to Mutiny You’re Building Mutiny I’ve uh had a quick go at it myself I’ve uh you know just had a quick play around but basically it’s a browser based wallet and you can install it as
Like a like a like an app on your phone or what’s the word um pwa Progressive web app um do you want to just talk a little bit you know just give us a high level overview what is Mutiny wallet yeah I mean muty is the kind of the goal
Is try to make the best self custodio lightning wallet and um doing that we kind of learned self custodio is really hard for a lot of users so um now it’s coming kind of like a hybrid wallet where um like right now like basically for most users it’s self custodia
Lightning it’s running LDK and BDK in your web browser and um well like try to make the best lightning up with that so it’s been pretty good so far we have like a lot of um a lot of different users now you know we there are times we got lots of forclosures we
Fixed like most of those now just like hardening the app and everything like that and now basically our business complaint is things like oh I can’t receive offline oh I don’t have a lighting address and all that stuff so now we’re kind of going down this path
Of fedy Min of uh you know it’s you know we have self custodia lightning it works pretty well now and we want to you know kind of enhance that with fetting where you know you can’t receive offline okay well if you’re offline it goes into a
Fediman and then you can sleep it to your lightning Channel Once you’re online or same with the lightning address you know you you can’t run an HTTP server on your phone okay the fety will and then you’ll sleep it to your balance um when you come online and
Stuff like that so basically you know we’re trying to like make this best lightning experience and and um with that we’re you know combining things like fedman to try to make it better and yeah something we’re also working on is like a lot of different social features
So like right now we have like a syn Noster cont and stuff like that we have an update coming out soon that’s going to like kind of make that like first class citizen in the app so like there going to be faces everywhere you can really like really make it really easy
To to pay friends and stuff like I’m here in Madera right now and we have a different like Noster engineering cohort thing going on here and everyone’s been using it to pay each other it’s fun where it’s like in the past you know when you uh like someone pays for for
Lunch and then you have to like you want to pay them back they’d like generate invoice you have to scan it and do that for every single person at lunch it takes forever it’s nice everyone just like okay oh Paul paid everyone searches Paul you hit send and it’s done you
Don’t need to like do that invoice dance it really makes the The Experience like a lot better so we been having a lot of fun with that quick question just on that I mean what about in the future if there’s like a lot of spam on Nostra
Spam like fake poll accounts how do you know it’s the real how do you know it’s the real poll in that example yeah I mean that’s that’s the Eternal question so basically I mean right now we we’re trusting your contact list the people you follow on Noster so if you follow a
Fake Paul like you’re up up I guess um yeah I mean nozar has ways to fix this like we display like the lighting address you can make sure okay like you are future Paul um at alb.com or whatever and like okay that’s the one I’ll send to and then uh you know as
Well there’s like nip fives and stuff we can verify the that stuff but yeah I mean the bootstrapping of Noster is hard of like verifying who you’re actually um becoming friends with or following and stuff so yeah we have different ideas around that like we want to add like
Onboarding inside of mutiny onto Noster you want to be able to like invite friends into Noster and like when you invite them they like Auto follow you and stuff like that so different things like that that try to like you know make that harder to happen cool cool and so I
Guess the other big criticism and I’m sure you’ve you’ve seen this criticism is around it being a browser-based wallet and obviously browser security being difficult people being maybe less able to verify what’s going on with an update of the app right could it be a malicious update could you just explain
A little bit of your thoughts around browser level security for this obviously monetary app yeah I mean like all those critics are not wrong like uh the browser is a scary place and um basically like you know we do have native apps that you can I mean this
They they’re in beta right now like you can download the APK and we have an an iOS test flight so like we we do recognize that and like you know if you don’t want to do the browser stuff like you probably should use the app like
Most users should be using the app the reason we did the browser stuff is because of um basically you know these app stores can just box everyone out and like I think it was in like 2013 or 14 like apple banned all Bitcoin while like that could very well happen again and
Then uh everyone is screwed so kind of that thing is like we always want that fall back of like you know we are not going to be stopped by these app stores even if they want to because we have this web fallback even if like the web
Is like 0.1% of your user base that’s fine it’s just basically just having that safety net of being able to come back um and you know not be stopped cuz you a lot of things like you know if you’re using uh something like maybe like Phoenix where it’s only in the App
Store like if you if they like rug you like the App Store bans it it’s like there’s kind of no way to get your money back besides like you know if you’d have to like go find another closing yeah using electrium and recovering that way right yeah ex exactly which is like you
Know 99% users won’t be able to figure that out at least you know the target audience we going forward trying to get like everyone on Lightning so that’s going to be really hard so basically having that web fallback makes it really easy um to like Safeguard against and as
Well it kind of lets us um you know give this like super easy onboarding where like a lot of times you know okay like you’re trying to onboard your waitress or something and it’s like okay download this app you got to search in the App Store it’s 50 megabyte file it takes
Forever to download on the shitty Wi-Fi and then you have to set up the wallet back up your seat all this stuff like it’s a long process versus like basically now we you know you send someone the link and they instantly on boarded on to like lightning which is a
Really powerful experience it makes things like so much easier a lot of times like at confer or something like oh try it out and it’s like they just like go to the link they’re like wait that was it I thought I had to like sign
Up like no you’re you have a wallet now it’s like you know kind of fun to like just like put it like into people’s hands and you know they’re kind of like almost like they don’t even consent they just have lightning without even trying to which is which is fun yeah now walk
Us through um some of the initial setup there because I I had to play around and I um I set up and it just just obviously in preparation for this I installed it I practiced you know just receiving into light like using lightning to receive from another lightning you know node
That I have and sent into that and it then autocreated the Channel and I interestingly I noted that it actually had some capacity on both sides so could you just tell us a little bit about you know what you’re doing there how the setup works yeah yeah so we’re working
With voltage as our LSP they have a product called um flow 2.0 so yeah basically like if you don’t have any channels yet fresh new wallet when you hit receive you can still receive on lightning and basically the payment will hit voltages on LSP node and then like
Basically for you need you still need to channel receive it to your end so volters will open open a channel to you for that payment plus a little bit extra and for the payment to you so you can get the uh the final Channel and the
Payment and um yeah so right now what it does is adds on an extra 100K stats for that so you get some inbound so your next receive doesn’t won’t have to have a charge as well as long as it’s under that 100K limit so yeah that’s kind of
The goal just trying to like make it easier and easier cuz you know we don’t want people to have to manage channels themselves like you know I I I’ve ran a lightning note for like 5 years and I I refuse to manage channels I just like I’m not touching it I opened these
Channels forever ago and they’re just going to work and it mostly works but like for any like you know I there’s a that thing’s been running forever and like that’s different for mobile wallets where you can’t really do that so um the LSP kind of gates all that stuff for us
And something we’ve been exploring a lot is like you know most wallets like something like Phoenix or Zeus like they all have like their own LSP same with Breeze like it’s like the wallet and the LSP are like a you know tied entity but we’re kind of taking a different
Approach of like we’re just trying to make like um we’re just trying to make the wallet and let the LSPs like be run by you know those professionals like we’re a bunch of devs we don’t know like you know like I said I don’t run I don’t
Manage my channels so I don’t want to have to do that for you know a million users on our um on our LSP so we like voltage do that we’re also like in talks with other people to like um added other LSP options so trying to make like you
Know like a free market of LSPs within the app so instead of like you know even if you like us we don’t like our LSP fees well then you just pick a different LSP within the app so trying to like you know create that like you know just the
Best app in class and then let the LSPs compete instead of like having the apps compete kind of thing so um you know we’re working you know in progress there we still right now voltage is the only option but we should have more options coming soon great so I mean I guess some
Of that I presume is based on the LSP spec so listeners check out my earlier episode with severan Alex buer where we kind of went in detail about the LSP spec um but yeah that’s it’s great to see that you you’ll have a bunch of options there because that’ll be handy
As well going forward um because there’ll be you know more challeng is coming and maybe certain even at a jurisdictional level right as as you know as listeners probably know wal Satoshi left the US market because presumably they didn’t want to serve us customers probably because of AML
Concerns is my guess um and so we may start to see that in other countries as well we’ll see maybe it’s just a us thing we don’t know um but you know maybe that allows people to sort of use a wallet from one jurisdiction but an
LSP from another and then that can sort of help sort of decentralize things a little bit further that way also I’m curious if you see you know further coming down the line there like it seems like the US government is sort of now currently uh there’s been a recent uh
Bit of an attack against the miners do you see more coming at a lightning level um at a lightning level maybe I think um honestly my biggest fear is all the Tapo asset stuff like once we start having lightning nodes being like almost mini exchanges is like swapping tether
For lightning like you could probably make a better argument that they’re um like money service businesses so I think that could really heat it up once um lightning Labs um get all get all that stuff out going but I think at the moment there’s not too much pressure
Luckily lightning is still pretty small so people haven’t really like you know tried to bite the bite them yet like the the thing is like you know most users today are custodial lightning users so it’s so much easier to just be like let’s just go after W Satoshi or
Something and try to you know pressure them versus like in individual node operators just because like you’re getting like you know way more easier truck points to go off easier truck point and like more effective you’re attacking more like individuals that way so that’s what they’ve been doing I
Think you know maybe maybe if we succeed in our goal of trying to get everyone on self cons of lightning maybe it’s a good thing then look after trust but uh not yet so far yeah we’ll see I think the other criticism people would have and I
Mean we kind of spoke about this earlier but I guess the criticism the criticism could be hey Bitcoin today cannot support that many users will people get priced out of this right and it’s kind of like well what what are you building here if only you know as you know
Brandon said on that episode and you probably agree we’re probably talking somewhere between 10 to 100 million users who can non-custodial use Bitcoin anyway in a world with 8 billion people and probably 300 million entities you know over 8 billion entities it’s we’re not we’re just not
Going to get that many people using the thing and so I guess the challenge would be will people get priced out of using this yeah I mean we directly experienced that during the huge fee spikes like of last year like fees are like 500 stats
Per Vite and like even if you have your channel open it still affects you because when you make a spend on Lightning you have to be able to afford if that channel closes while you’re spending it so you have to be able to afford that htlc and like at those High
Fee rates it like even if you have like people would have like you know 200k stats on Lightning but it’s all effectively um useless to them because the channel fees just to be able to spend that was too expensive so um yeah we do like experience that already of
Like you know uh having these you know in the future this is going to be the barrier to entry is going to be higher and higher so this is why we’re kind of going down the fedt path of like okay you can start on fedt you know there’s a
You know there’s a giant Gateway that manages the fedt lightning channels and stuff like that so you don’t have to think about that yourself and worry about chain fees and then you know once you say you get enough money in the app where you can now justify having your
Own channel then you can go and do that and um so that’s kind of the goal there is kind of making this hybrid wallet where you know you can Elevate yourself without having to like change wallets and change every your whole trust model and stuff you know just like you can
Start in fent and then move to lightning when you’re ready when it makes sense to instead of just like forcing the user like okay go pay a million chain fees and all this stuff and you know you have to put like thousands of dollars in this
App to use it like we don’t want that so fed has kind of that nice bridge for us to get there I see so that’s and that’s where you was you mentioning the hybrid aspect so can you just talk a little bit about how exactly you plan to build in
Like fedy mint support or you know fedy is it fedy mint support in the Mutiny app or how how’s that going to work yeah it’s actually already in there it’s just uh a little bit hidden but if you go to like in the settings you can add
Federations um but yeah you need like an invite code for that yeah yeah yeah so like every Federation has their own invite code and then once you have that you’re a part of it and you can start transacting so right now the way it works is like if you have a federation
Then all your um sends will go in there if it’s under like 200k stats I think and then um and then we have the like once you have a balance in there there a swap button will come up and you can click that if you want to swap it into
Self custodial so basically we’re trying to like you know have that iterative approach of like um our end goal is like you know you open the app and there’s a default fent already enabled for you and so you just immediately start transacting you can like receive like
You know one set and it still work and then um you know as you accumulate that balance then You’ swap into self cudio lightning when you’re ready and um you know we’ll probably have like different like modes of like you know fighting fent only lightning only you can have
Like you know receive onedent but SWAT and then always uh withdraw it straight to self lightning when you’re online like stuff like that so you know we’re still like kind of valuing that like you know the fediman stuff is really really new it’s you know like the fedman team
Just released like 0.2 of the fman software which is like kind of their we’re trying to um maintain backwards compatibility for now on so like trying to make less breaking changes and stuff to the protocol so things are like just starting to stabilize now so it’s still
Like you know not even you know there’s not there’s like barely any main net federations if any it’s mostly like hobby um kind of federations not like the liquid Federation kind of thing that’s it’s going to run for like 6 years so we’re still like kind of
Getting you know our feet wet but um the end goal is to kind of get there where everyone is using the stuff um for their you know small value payments and any large stuff goes into self custodial back to the show in a moment Nomad capital.com can help you with offshore
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The show with Ben gotcha and so I’m curious I’m not sure how deep the integration is with fedy mints and things as I understand the concept with fedy mint and maybe with fetty the app is that you have Guardians and the idea is let’s say you know the hypothetical
Noob new coiner person doesn’t really know what they’re doing they kind of lost it and the idea is they need to go find you know the guardian who can help them recover their SATs so would that concept exist in a mutiny wallet context or it’s more like know your so here like
How would that work yeah like um we we’re not going to like run the guardian or anything in a web browser that’s a bit too much but uh yeah we want to have like basically like we want to eventually have defaults um that just make it easier so you have to think
About that but as part of that like you know somewhere to the LSP thing we’re talking about like we want it to be like you don’t just have to use ours or the one we recommend you want like a free market so something that I have to work
On this week actually is kind of making like a a way to like advertise fedin on Noster and create discoverability layer there where you could say like this is a Fed these are the fees these are the different properties it’s a you know this one’s a one of one or this one’s a
Five of seven so you can evaluate the different trust models and maybe even assign like okay this is a 5 of seven this is you know seven anons or this is a five of seven but it’s you know Matt Marty step on yeah you people you trust
Kind of thing so you know it’s uh it’s all work in progress but yeah I think we want to have like kind of a discoverability area in the app so it’s like I don’t want to trust this one but I know this one I trust or this one they
Can find one that they can trust and move to that so that’s kind of the goal we’re also like working on um we have like minimal cashew support we’re working on as well for like sweeping cashew tokens just kind of like just kind of like let all the different
Models work and you know users can pick what they want interesting and so then I presume and I’ve heard this from um some of the fety mint and fetty uh let’s say proponents also is this idea that you might have one app with connections to multiple so and I and I believe someone
Correct me you correct me if I’m wrong but I understand the Fetti app also allows you to have multiple fety mints that you are sort of connected with and you might have you know 10,000 sets on one fety mint and another 20,000 sets on another and so on so would you build a
Similar functionality in Mutiny like you would have Mutiny and you might have like a balance with you know Aon Federation and another one with known Federation and then like another one with the cashew thing and then another balance at self custodia you would have like multiple balances Yeah Yeah we
Actually do have multiple Federation support in the app it’s I we haven’t tested it too well cuz there’s not enough federations really test to like battle hard in it yet but um there’s like support there and like in theory we can do things where it’s like say have
Like 10K stats in one Federation and 10K stats in another we get an invoice for 15K stats in theory we could pay it where it still like spends from both in in like anomic way kind of like MPP but for federations kind of exactly exactly so so um you know we haven’t implemented
Any of that stuff yet but in theory it’s possible so we kind of want to have like you know it would be cool like maybe there is no default Federation it’s default federations and you like you you by default you know get split among like three federations so if one rug PS it’s
Not just all of our users all their money is gone you know it’s like okay everyone got a haircut sucks but it’s not everyone’s totally rug bold kind of thing I see and I guess that’s kind of moving towards a similar idea of having a unified balance right as opposed to
Users having to think about oh what’s my onchain what’s my lightning what’s my this like that um interesting okay um also I know obviously you were working at Short bits you know in in a past uh Bitcoin life let’s say and you were kind of interested in the DLC and I know a
Concept there was this idea of stable channels and synthetic USD for some users I know this is an area you’re considering for Mutiny wallet also so can you just elaborate a bit there what are you looking to build there yeah it’s interesting if you talk to like people
Like honestly like one of the biggest like crypto users in the world are like they don’t actually they’re using like usdc and usdt kind of things where they’re just like you know they don’t have access to banking but tether is like the best thing that they could ever
Have cuz it’s dollars and it’s like you know they can kind of custody you their money versus like you know we’re all like here just like we have modern banking kind of things but we just don’t want to have inflation anymore so we’re just you know holding Bitcoin but for
Those people like it’s uh really important to just have access to Dollars and you know we don’t you know mutin is using self Cota lightning there’s no on Lightning yet kind of thing so um there’s kind of like two days we can do it like fedy has this a concept called
Uh stability pools which is like similar to like kind of DLC model where you have basically like um people like taking different uh bets on the Bitcoin price and you can take basically just take a bet saying I’m going short Bitcoin and by holding Bitcoin it ends up like you
Know basically effectively holding dollars and stuff and uh I think that’d be like really powerful because basically we can have like a Bitcoin wallet that you know even if if you don’t want to use Bitcoin you can start out just using it as a dollar’s wallet
And then once you like see like hey these invoices the amounts keep getting lower but it’s the same dollars and it’s like yeah bitcoin price is going up and it kind of becomes like an orange peling method so I think like you know just basically trying to make it like feature
Complete with every single kind of use case that users would want they just want it to be like a money app not a Bitcoin app and then you know we can kind of get the most of amount of users on board on the Bitcoin if we’re just
You know basic just throwing Bitcoin in their face at every chance while they’re using their normal stuff um yeah that’s kind of our goal we we even talked about like what if we added like you know Tron support of like you know if a Tron
Invoice comes up we can we can uh do like a a swap of like like a swap in the background kind of like yeah exactly where but like instead of like supporting like liquid Bitcoin just support like every single chain and like have you know some there’s like different services that that’ll like
Swap it for you you know that that becomes into you know we don’t really want to do shitcoin things so we haven’t gone down that route but it is a it’s it’s an interesting idea of like you know what if your Bitcoin wallet could pay any coiner in the world and any
coiner could pay you but you’ll receive Bitcoin like that’s kind of great and um you know it’s an interesting concept you know building it’s another thing of like building out all the services and stuff but uh I do kind of think it’s interesting thought
Experience of like you know if we go if you say okay we’re allowing dollars into this app it’s like well why not allow other shitcoins and um you know yeah interesting yeah yeah interesting and I guess for some users it’s kind of like you’re you’re trying to give them a baby
Step way in um so I can understand that and and I understand even with the aqua guys they’re kind of doing it but it’s like a it’s like a liquid based sort of wallet like the it’s kind of like balances it Al to be clear it also has a
Bitcoin balance if you wanted to but the other aspects of it are kind of like an lbtc base but you can kind of pay out over lightning or receive in using tether not just liquid tether but ethereum tether and Tron tether because it’s using like swap providers in the
Background so I guess in a similar way Mutiny could build a similar kind of hey swap in swap out whatever you want but like your balance held with us is a Bitcoin and lightning balance that that would be the idea right yeah exactly of like you know if you want to interact
With the shitcoin world go ahead and do it you’re a bitcoiner you get Bitcoin at the end and like you know it just kind of works out for you so but then I guess the only other aspect when it comes to synthetic USD as we kind of spoke about
Earlier people getting priced out of things the stable Channel concept and you know you’ll understand this better than me so you correct me here but but my understanding is that does require a bit more onchain interaction to or at least the possibility of more onchain interaction po if there especially if
There’s violent moves in the price which might be hard from a user experience perspective right compared to if I’m thinking of let’s say people using let’s say blink as an another example where it’s kind of like it’s a custodial Bitcoin and a lightning app but they’ve got stable stats in there and that’s
Kind of their way of giving the users a a quote unquote USD balance How would how would the Mutiny style synthetic USD or kind of stable Channel DLC style work yeah I mean we’ve talked about this a lot internally like you know maybe it doesn’t even make sense to kind of build
That because like we could just do it inside the fety Min it’s so much easier and like in that regard kind of like offload it to them and let them kind of handle that yeah and it’s just like because like at the end of the day like if you’re using tether you’re already
Have a trust model so it’s like taking self custodial of your te tether is like it’s still not self custodial so it’s like why are we going through this headache of like 10 Xing the complexity re reimplementing everything we still have a trust model at the end of the day
So maybe just like throw it into the fedy Min and then just like Let It handle that cuz like inside the fedman 2 you have like way better liquidity and all this stuff this big unified Thing versus like if you have a single channel it’s like okay this channel is fixed in
Size and making payments is like this whole complex thing and like you know if I want to like sell some to like back to bitcoin it’s like this whole other thing it’s like you know complicates like everything versus like the FED can kind of just handle all that for us and then
You know we still got the experience same experience and it’s like the trust model isn’t that much different where it’s like kind of worth all that effort you know maybe if you want to hold like a million dollars in tether okay don’t do it in the fent but like if you want
To hold a million dollars you probably shouldn’t be using mey like you know it’s a browser app like you know it’s that’s not the use case for Mutiny so um you know it kind of gets into those different uh trade-offs there yeah gotcha so in your mind who’s the target
Audience for mutiny um or hope is like our goal is like you know the like the the bitcoiners like us who like you know I want to recommend the best lightning wallet to for that that’s on your phone so like kind of like you know hopefully every bitcoiner is using it and then
When you go to onboard your friend or your waiter or you know whoever guy in the street you also recommend Mutiny cuz not only is it good for like the hardcore bitcoiners but it’s good for the the firsttime bitcoiners and that that’s kind of why we’re doing this
Hybrid approach of like you can start out in this um easy um fetty world where all you have to do is uh you know you don’t worry about channels or fees or really anything like that you just hit send and receive and it happens and then you know as you
Understand more and more along your Bitcoin Journey we have different ways to enhance that um you know kind of model for you so you know cuz I think a lot of people you know they on board a friend onto walls toi or something and then like 2 years later you have to like
Call them up and like oh by the way it’s getting removed by from America you have to like go to Mutiny now or go to Phoenix or go to this and it’s like you’re kind of like you recommend a wallet but like in the back of your head
You’re always like this is the wrong move they’re going eventually have to get off of this and it’s it’s never a good experience so we kind of want to want to have that experience of me where you can you can stay here you can you can stay here forever kind of thing of
Like this will always be a good spending wallet for you whether you’re a noob or an advanced user is because we have this Progressive enhancement of uh all the different use cases but um you know a lot of things to build there but um work in progress yeah look it sounds like
It’s an ambitious Vision but at the same time I like that that you guys are trying this you know there’s lots of different approaches out there right there are some people who are and you know and to be fair there’ll be some users who are critical because they
Don’t want any you know non any they don’t want any custodial stuff whatsoever they just want only self custody um but there’s going to be many different approaches people can choose uh and you can sort of pick what works for you and um so I think that’s that’s
Probably a good spot uh so I guess closing up here any I guess any final thoughts for people on uh you know where Bitcoin is going um actually one one other area I want to I did want to ask you about this so there’s been this kind
Of criticism of let’s say you know number go up right at the same time you know ETF you know Etc there’s lots of criticisms of that uh but at the same time I guess the way I’m seeing it is it’s kind of like we’ve got this funnel
Right and noobs will come in and they’ll buy the ETF without realizing they’re not buying real Bitcoin and of course we want to sort of get them down the funnel to you know I see it as like you know whether we like it or not no matter how
Many podcasts we do or articles we write or whatever the price is what pulls a lot of these people in so I’m curious your view are you seeing it in a similar way or do you see it as like you know too many people onboarding into an on
Quote unquote onboarding into an ETF is a bad thing because they’re kind of they are put it this way they just want the number go up they and they’re sort of there’s like a tragedy of the comment here like they just want the number go
Up but they’re not willing to sort of do anything to help decentralize Bitcoin or keep it decentralized what do you think about that yeah I think um it’s like basically like I think it’s only bad if like the ETF is like uh B people’s only touch point in Bitcoin we like they’re
Like cool I’m all in on bitcoin like you guys and then they’re just holding the ETF and then like you know they never actually try to like do anything with it you know they never learn what like a block hash or anything is they’re just
Like oh yeah number go up I’m with you guys like that would be bad but I think like you know the Fiat system is like so screwed that it’s going to be okay like you know what’s really going to drive Bitcoin adoption like initially right
Now is this number go up but I think the end game is not number go up it’s you know number go down for the dollars and as well as like different you know when you want to go buy McDonald’s they’re just going to stop accepting dollars and like we’re taking Bitcoin only like
That’s when the true adoption happens when like you’re kind of like these emerchant you want to spend with are accepting Bitcoin and like that’s the default so you know it’s it’s we’re a long way to get there but I think like that’s going to be the end game if this
Is going to work because you know the smart money in the room smart people in the room are going be like yeah we only take Bitcoin now like with a lot you know a lot of Bitcoins are on this path now like I just live their life in
Bitcoin they don’t use dollars anymore and I think the rest of the world will eventually catch on and do the same it’s just like getting to that is going to be a hard part and so I think you know the ETF is a good middle step of like you
Know getting like you know someone like Black Rock to like go on a Bitcoin standard it’s not going to happen overnight ETF is a you know step one of that and you know step two is they you know they take self self- custody of it you know step three is like you know
We’re selling all of our real estate and only holding Bitcoin but you know that’s a while away probably but um you know one day I think is like kind of the end game there so I think I think I’m not too worried about like you know everything going into ETFs like you know
For one you know it’s a proof of work system not a proof of stake system so even if they have all the Bitcoin they still have no control over us so them and as well it’s like you know like you said the number going up is going to
Draw more and more you um eyes and attention to bitcoin and in game that’s that’s all we can like hope for is just you know if people never hear about Bitcoin it’s never going to adopted so we need some sort of marketing and uh number go up is kind of the best
Marketing you can ever have so I’m happy I think and yeah and I think I think that’s a fair way to think of it I think our job if you will is to sort of take those ETF bitcoiners and sort of convert them let’s say into people who care
About Liberty and sovereignty and all these aspects uh but it’s I think it’s Folly to just think we can uh you know just uh Hector at people to uh adopt the thing when they are maybe not listening to us or they’re not even paying attention to us at all because you know
We’re not important to them at this point maybe maybe later they you know they sort of start listening to podcasts reading books and using apps like Mutiny and things like this uh and at least come down the pathway um any other thoughts you want to close out
On um no I mean I’ll look is I look is good I think for Bitcoin like you know numbers been going up a lot so that’s been fun but uh you know it’s tech-wise as well like you know we’ve been talked about the beginning of this pod like
Lots of different things are happening the space and it’s really exciting to see like a lot of these dreams we’ve had a like years ago are kind of like coming to fruition and are actually happening so I’ve been really it’s been really fun like following all this stuff and I
Think the Outlook is good like you know lightning is not going to die tomorrow kind of thing that a lot of people are saying and you know inscriptions aren’t going to kill Bitcoin I think we’re just fine and uh all look is good yeah great actually I’m curious one other thing you
Mentioned around the inscriptions I know um there’s been kind of a lot of debate about it the spam or inscriptions blc2 and stamps if people want to be more specific about the more kind of pollutive elements of this uh in your view why are they bad uh that’s a good
Good question so like this it gets really into like the weeds cuz it’s like okay so like why are they bad um I mean they’re quote unquote like polluting the chain but like in theory that’s just an incentives problem like we have a block size and everything that’s supposed to
Prevent that so if the block size is not solving that then then what is the block size for so it’s either like an admission that the block size is either too big or there’s something else what’s wrong with the incentive system I think stamp’s kind of highlighted that really
Well where it’s just a bunch of out puts and the problem is those outputs can’t be pruned from the utxo set so um that you know that’s like kind of like forever growth that’s not just like verify once but you verify it and now it’s stuck in your utxo set forever so
Yeah I think like maybe there’s an incentive problem there of like outputs are too cheap and like SE tried to fix that that’s kind of why we did the SE discount was it made it cheaper to spend um this like to destroy outputs and then to create new outputs so that was like
One of the main things you know maybe we should have gone further and like the thing is we get into this like kind of like circular logic where it’s like okay maybe we should make the witness discount even uh bigger like make it 8X instead of 4X to like disincentivize
These um all these outputs but now that’s if we increase the Cy discount now all these um inscriptions are cheaper and stuff so now people can put jpegs in cheaper so we kind of you know it’s we’re just like picking uh different trade-offs here so I think
Like the current set is fine in my opinion like at the end of the day it’s like if this if Bitcoin is going to work these nfts are like not going to be valuable in the future most likely so it’s like just let them run out of money
Let you know there’s always going to be these uh you know there’s a greater or there’s a full born every day kind of thing so like just let it run its course and it’ll be fine like this has happened before this is going to happen again
Like I’m not too worried about it but yeah it’s like you know it is highlighted a lot of the Bitcoin space of like um I think like when I got into Bitcoin in like 2017 the kind of the The Narrative was like shitcoins are bad bad
Cuz you can do it all on bitcoin like you don’t need to do um you know like these are obviously scams like you know don’t buy icos and nfts but they’re also scams because they’re telling you you can’t do this on bitcoin and now like people are doing it on bitcoin they are
Still scams but then people are like we need to get this off of Bitcoin which I think is wrong because like I think like you know like I met someone here in uh Madera at this thing where he was an ethereum guy and he came to bitcoin
Because of uh ordinals and now he’s like a nostr Dev doing like really cool Bitcoin things as well and it’s like that’s going to happen if we allow these um you know these shitcoin devs to come like you know a lot of us um you know I
Got into Bitcoin and then shitcoins and then found the light but a lot of times now nowadays people aren’t or even before this ordinal stuff people are just never touching Bitcoin it’s like only like they’d be like oh it’s it’s ethereum or Salon or Tron they never
Even thought about Bitcoin as an option and oral is kind of like bringing people to here and you know there’s a lot of stupid there we can all see that but there’s going to you know whatever percentage that it is they’re going to come into see the light of like real
Bitcoin stuff and I think that’s going to be we kind of need that cuz you know the more and more developers more things happening in Bitcoin is always better yeah and I think to I guess to round it off as as we’ve been talking about a lot of different aspects for this episode
You know biggest challenges opportunities soft fors covenants you know what are we doing about trying to onboard people ultimately we want more people to use Bitcoin if we get more people hodling and you know I want to get more people hodling Bitcoin using Bitcoin and ideally denominating in
Bitcoin right the more people we can get to sort of mentally do that we’re winning right like we are winning it’s just that yeah there’s some of these scam spam things that I would rather not have but I also recognize I can’t stop them I can’t filter them and so that’s
Kind of that’s how I’m seeing it um but uh yeah thanks for joining me and I we’ll put all the links in the show notes so it’s uh Mutiny wallet.com um and Ben the Carman on social media I’ll put the links in the in the descriptions and Ben thanks for joining me today
Thank you Stefan I hope you enjoyed the the show get the show notes at Stefan l.com 551 and don’t forget to give the show a like And subscribe if you enjoyed it thanks for listening and I’ll see you in the citadels
6 Comments
the problem with the Lighting Network is that anyone can open channels to anyone else. it's like trying to open a private road from a major highway to your house directly. initially when it came out i thought LN would evolve similar to modern highways.
Bitcoin is an ogre, like onions
Thx. I like mutiny
Nice
Protect the base layer. Build 2nd and 3rd layer solutions instead.
This was good, finished it while at the gym on Spotify.