Kevin Rooke - 00:00:00:
Lisa Neigut is a member of BlockStream's Lightning team, as well as the Cofounder at Base58, branded as the world's best bitcoin education company. In our conversation, we got into exactly what work Lisa is doing on Lightning at Blockstream right now. We discussed Core LN and the trade offs and differences between some of the different Lightning implementations available today, and we discussed Lightning centralization risks and the work that Lisa is doing in educating bitcoin developers at Base58. As always, this is a Lightning podcast, so if you're enjoying the show, if you learn something new, the best way that you can let me know is by sending in comments and questions over the Lightning Network. In the last couple of weeks, we passed 500,000 sats. You guys have been sending a lot of comments and questions. We are on our way to a million. So thank you for everyone who has supported the show so far. Quick shout out before we get into it. Voltage is today's sponsor. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure, and we will have more from Voltage later in the show in the Lightning round. Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm excited to have you on the show, but before we get into all the work you're doing at Base58, Blockstream, I want to step back and understand the first moment that you learned about bitcoin or that you recognized you wanted to work in bitcoin.
Lisa Neigut - 00:01:30:
Yeah. Okay. You know, I'd be honest. I can't remember the first time I heard about bitcoin. I had a friend who was probably, like, sometime in 2014, 2015, who I had a couple of friends during that time period who explained bitcoin to me and, like, tell me about proof of work and that sort of thing. I always thought it was, like, fascinating and kind of, like, definitely sort of mind boggling to understand what they were even talking about, if that makes sense, because the first time you hear about proof of work, you're like, wait, what do you mean? There's computers that just compute stuff and somehow that earns them money. I don't understand how that works. I, at the time, was doing a lot of software engineering, more than the mobile dev side, but yeah, anyway and I think at one point I had a friend who had sent $10 off in an envelope to buy ten bitcoins. He bought them at, like, a dollar each rate. And I remember just being like I remember thinking, like, wow, that's really cool. I wish I could do that, but I don't know how to, so I won't look into it, et cetera. And then professionally, career wise, I got an opportunity to get hired onto basically, I got hired by Cash App in 2017 2018, and I don't know how familiar you are with software engineering teams, but usually when you get hired into a big project. They'll have a couple of teams that are looking for people to work on their projects. And the two projects at Cash App that were happening at the time, one was a big sharding thing, which is like a database thing. So they were working on a big sharding project so I could go learn how to be a database guru on the charting team. Or their bitcoin team was looking for people to work on their Bitcoin back end stuff. And they were like, Lisa, which team do you want to go work on? I was like, Well, I'd really like to work on crypto stuff because that sounds awesome and super fun. So that's why I ended up, like, getting into bitcoin for real. And I bought my first bitcoin while working on the Bitcoin team at Cash App, et cetera. But I had heard of it before that, and a friend and I had tried writing some Ethereum contracts, like, a few years, a few summers before I ended up getting on that team.
Kevin Rooke - 00:03:41:
Love it. Yeah, that's very cool. So talk to me. How did you then transition from Cash app to now working on Lightning app, Blockstream?
Lisa Neigut - 00:03:49:
Yeah, that's actually kind of an interesting story in and of itself. So I started work at Cash App in probably January, February, I want to say 2018. Yeah, 2018. And part of, like, I needed to learn all there is to know about Bitcoin. So I started reading Andreas Antonopoulos' book Mastering Bitcoin. Started just kind of poking around on the bits, et cetera. And I noticed in one of the just like Andreas talks about the block headers, et cetera, one of the things in the block headers is the time field is only four bytes long, which, if you know anything about timestamps in computing, et cetera, the Y2K bug that happened years ago. The problem with that is that they had only had two digits to show what year it was. So when you hit 1999, when that two digits roll over what you got, you get zero zero. Does that mean 1900,? All of the systems that existed assumed that meant 1900. They hadn't taken into the fact that, like, we're now in 2000, right? So the digits rolling off the problem. Bitcoin has a similar problem and it's timestamp in the blockheaders and that there's only space to get up to. I thought it was to 20. So there's a lot of computers that will have a similar problem to the Y2K Bug in 2038. If they've only using four bytes, it will roll over and it'll go back to zero. And so if you don't update your system to have more space for what time it is, you're going to be in trouble. Bitcoin, I thought, had the same problem, which would be like but it turns out because of the way that the bits are recorded, et cetera, it actually won't happen until 2108 or something like that. So we have a little bit of time before this is like a massive problem for the network is what I'm saying. But I recognize this is a problem just by reading Andreas's book. I was like, oh, there's like a bug in bitcoin. This is a problem that will need to be solved at some point. What if that person who fixed it was me? How would I go about changing this one field from being four bytes to usually they double it, they make it eight bytes long. And then you're basically covered for the amount of time from now until the end of human history in hopes, right? So you basically double the amount of space you use for that number anyways. So this became kind of like a mini rabbit hole. I could look through bitcoin core, which I never really spent any time with before, and started going through all the BIPS, trying to find bits that have changed anything in the block header, just as like, okay, I want to change this thing. I want to change this one field. How do I make that happen for bitcoin? What would the process be? So, part of figuring that out, I started digging through all the BIPS and found a couple that dealt with the block headers. And then there was one that seemed like it was pretty well written. And in the BIPS, or bitcoin improvement proposals, they're in this open GitHub repo. Anyone can go read them. Anyone can write one and propose one. Whether or not it gets accepted is like a whole different question. But the first step is usually writing a BIP. Part of the bips have like, a pretty standardized format. It's kind of like filling out a form. Like, if you go to the DMV, they'll give you a form and it's like, what's your name? What's your car make? What's model? Describe your problem, or whatever part of the form for a BIP is. It lists authors. It gives their name and their email address. This is, like, on every bit. So the one bit that I found that had information about how you would change kind of like the blockheader or touch the block header, there were three authors. So I took their emails and I Google their emails just to see who I was dealing with. One of them was Peter Todd. I found a zip and timestamp project. I thought that was kind of interesting, but didn't really know what I was looking at either because, to remind you, I've just started getting into blockchain stuff. I have some stuff and not like, a lot of stuff. I'm still learning a whole bunch of stuff. So that was a little over my head. But I was like, oh, this is cool. And then I think I ended up reading every single citation in the white paper that had anything to do with time because I thought that maybe that would help anyways. And then the second person I couldn't find and the third person was Rusty Russell. I found his blog. I thought his blog was really great and really understandable, and I was like, this is the person I can ask about this problem, right? So I wrote Rusty an email. I just took the email that I found in the BIP. I wrote him in whole like, hey, I found this problem. Here's what I'm thinking here's. Like, is anyone working on this? Is this worth solving? Whatever. And I sent it off to him. And this is all within the first 30 days of starting the work at Square or I guess Block now the Cash App team. Meanwhile, when a company hires you to work on their software projects, they're not hiring you to go work on Bitcoin. Really? I got hired to work on Square's Cash App team. The back end is all written at the time, it was all in Java. I think they've since moved mostly to Kotlin, so it was like a big Java application that I'm also supposed to be spending all my work time learning about, right? So I kind of got down this rabbit hole sort of looking into this. And then at some point it's like, no, I actually have to get stuff done for Cash App, so I will start spending more of my time working on their software than poking around in the Bitcoin stuff. Anyways, I ended up anyways, when I sent this email off, I didn't hear back from Rusty for like months. And then four or five months later, he actually went through and read all his emails that he hadn't looked into and he found mine. He's like, oh, this is an interesting question here, Peter. Willa would know more about this than I would, so he Cc'd Willa. And so then I was like, chatting with Peter about this problem and was like, okay, we came up with some ideas that might work. And I was like, okay, let me write some unit tests, et cetera, and get back to you about this. Of course, I've never written C code before. I've never run bitcoin core. I'm just like, sure, I'll figure it out, it'll be fine. But in the meantime, Rusty is like, hey, I work on Lightning, which I had heard about a bit. Now, having worked at on the Cash Up team, I've been there for a few months now. I've heard of Lightning. I was like, oh, that sounds really cool. We're hiring. Do you want to work on C Lightning full time? And I was like, I don't know any C. I don't know anything about Lightning. I would love to learn. I just started this new job. I'd feel really weird leaving because they just hired me, but it sounds like an interesting problem and I would be really dumb to say no since you keep asking me to come interview for you. So I will like, yeah, sure, I'll come interview. And so, of course, I went through the interview process and they were like, great, we like to hire you. So that's how I ended up at Blockstream is a little bit of a journey, but yeah, love it.
Kevin Rooke - 00:10:44:
And can you talk to me now about what you're working on now at Blockstream and specifically on the Lightning team?
Lisa Neigut - 00:10:51:
Yeah, so I work on Lightning and used to be called C Lightning. We now recently rebranded like two days ago. We're now calling ourselves Core Lightning. Or CLN for short. So I work on CLN. I am a protocol dev but the first few years of me working at Blockstream is working on this protocol change called Collaborative Channel Opens, you see, called dual funding. But basically the idea is that two Lightning nodes can open a channel together. And when they open that channel, both sides can have money in the channel on both sides, which might sound like how you would think that Lightning works, but it doesn't. Currently, most Lightning knows when they open channels, only one side has an opportunity to put money into it. So I was rigging that for a long time. Then we built out something once we had that built, we could build something out called Liquidity Ads, which is the ability of me to advertise that if you open a channel with me, you can pay me some money and I will put money into the channel on my side. So basically, it's a way that you can pay me to give you inbound Liquidity at Channel Open, which, like, if you're a vendor or you're trying to get people to send you money on Lightning, you need a lot of this stuff that we call inbound Liquidity. Liquidity Ads are a super decentralized way, very low cost. Like, the only cost you pay are the person that is advertising and what their rates are. They tell you how much they're charging for stuff. So, yeah, basically built with Liquidity Ad decentralized bulletin board, marketplace system for Lightning nodes. And it's open and people use it these days. Recently, since I did all that work on Liquidity Ad stuff, I thought, oh, it would be really nice to be able to see all the accounting of how much you've made off of Liquidity Ads sales, how much you've made on routing fees, how much are you paying on chain fees for each of your channels, et cetera. So the last few months recently, I've been working on something a little not quite protocol related, but a little further up the stack, so to speak. I've been building an accounting software, like really in depth bookkeeping software for CLN, C Lightning, formerly known as C Lightning, which was hoping to get it out this release. I think we're going to push it to our next one. So that should hopefully be out sometime this summer. But basically that will allow you to run your Lightning node and be able to get really good granular details and CFDs print outs of, like, how much money did you make? Where did your money go when the channel closed? Who got all the funds? When a channel closes, what are all the outputs of that channel like? That can happen because there's a lot of stuff that can happen that you don't get a lot of visibility into right now. So the system that I've been working on will let you see all of what's happening kind of real time with your channel closes, et cetera. In addition to giving you…
Kevin Rooke - 00:13:52:
Will that just be for core Lightning, or will that be available for all implementations?
Lisa Neigut - 00:13:56:
No, we had to, like, basically so, like, a big part of this is like data collection, right? So I had to change. I had basically spent a good amount of time adding all this logging data very specific, like coin movement logging data to core Lightning. I don't think any of the other implementations have that level of logging available that they make possible. So it would be great. I think this is something that users should demand of every Lightning node. I think that there is some accounting stuff that exists on like LND, and I don't know what eclair does for accounting but I'm pretty convinced that ours is going to be really good. Granularity in terms of you'll be able to see exactly what the on chain costs were by each channel and see where those costs are. And when a channel gets closed unilaterally, it can be very expensive and you'll be able to see exactly where all that expense went.
Kevin Rooke - 00:14:57:
Interesting. I'd love to understand more about the Lightning implementation ecosystem right now, and this is coming from someone with very little technical background. So I just love a high level explanation of what the importance is of having all these different implementations and what differentiates them.
Lisa Neigut - 00:15:19:
Yes, that's a really, really good question. So I think for me, at least, like, one of the most so some good background context for this, I think, is to understand some of the, I don't know, problems is the right thing. But to understand and sort of like when Lightning was created, we're kind of comparing and contrasting it to the way that bitcoin core was developed. Right. So bitcoin core, if you wanted to rewrite another implementation so bitcoin core is written in C++, right? There's a couple of other, if you wanted to take bitcoin core as an implementation and reimplement it in a different language in Rust, for example. So there's an ongoing project right now to reimplement it in Rust, et cetera. But in order to do that, you have to reverse engineer a lot of what's inside of bitcoin core. So you have to go in and you have to be able to read the code and rewrite what's in the code really correctly. If you get anything wrong, it's possible that you'd create a chain split or like a consensus error, right. Because it's very important that all of the Bitcoin Core nodes do exactly the same thing for a large part of the functionality that they cover. So we call that consensus critical code, right? There's no one who took exactly what needed to happen and wrote it down in human readable language, that you could take that human readable language and just reimplement Bitcoin Core from these instructions that someone wrote down about how it should work. So when Lightning was created, the people who were redoing Lightning who were making the Lightning Network happen were from a bunch of different teams. And they all had seen kind of the difficulty that not having this commonly well understood document that explain how Bitcoin Core should deal with different types of transaction things, et cetera, and decided that they were going to do a couple of things differently. The first is that they were going to write down exactly how the Lightning nodes worked at every level. So everything that a Lightning node does will be written down and documented in like a human readable document. The other thing that they were going to do differently is that we're going to have different teams, multiple implementations, all implementing the same written documentation from the start so that there would never be a point in time when Lightning stuff that a Lightning node does wasn't documented in like a centrally understood place. So I think there's a couple of things that this kind of helps with. One is it makes the ecosystem of developers building on Lightning more dispersed, decentralized, it's way more decentralized process. So if like C Lightning decided to stop working on their Lightning implementation, for example, there will be two or three other projects still working on Lightning, right? The other thing is that since there's this commonly understood and well tested and everyone has implemented from the same written instruction set, we call it the specification just like or more commonly the spec, right? So the spec is like the written instructions of exactly how these nodes talk to each other. If someone wanted to come along and build a new Lightning implementation, which this actually happened with LDK, which is the Rust-based one, they went through the spec and they re implemented the spec. It meant they didn't have to go look through C Lightning and reverse engineer all the code and C Lightning because there's written recipe of instructions of how to make a node that would talk effort seamlessly with all the other Lightning implications that already exist. So that's part of the history around why are there so many implementations, how do they work together, et cetera. The idea is that there's this common specification that everyone adheres to and contributes to. And when you create new features for Lightning, you would add them to this written document so that anyone else could then replicate it on their own without having to talk to you. Right.
Kevin Rooke - 00:19:29:
Right. Now, is this spec list? Is this the bolts?
Lisa Neigut - 00:19:33:
This is the bolts. Yeah, exactly.
Kevin Rooke - 00:19:35:
Got it.
Lisa Neigut - 00:19:35:
The bolts are pretty different in that regard from the BIPS. So when we were talking earlier about how I got into Lightning, I mean into bitcoin, and I was saying I had gone to the bit repo and looked through the BIPS, right. Those are written very differently because those are written on, like, we would like to change something. Here's a proposal for changing it. Here's how we're going to change it. Here's how the change is going to work. Here's a link to a PR or pull request that changes the actual code. So here's the code changes you would need. Sometimes they include sort of spec level language, but it's not just like the style of writing. And the purpose of each bit as a document is very different from the sort of thing that is in the bolts. So bolts use, like, spec language. You must do this if this sort of so it's almost like specs are almost like writing code, but in human readable language, whereas BIPS are very much like essays to some extent.
Kevin Rooke - 00:20:35:
I see. Now, if you're a node operator today, or if you're a business trying to build on Lightning, how do you make a decision on which implementation you should choose?
Lisa Neigut - 00:20:47:
Yes, let's talk about implementations. They're all different, right. So every implementation is built by a different team. As far as I know, they're all written in different languages. So there's one that's written in Go, that's LND, there's one that's written in C. This is Core Lightning. There's one that's written in Scala, which is ACINQ or the Eclair node. I think it's the ACINQ. I forget what they call their node, but I think it's just ACINQ’s node. Then there's if you wanted to run something in Rust, there's the LDK project, which isn't actually a node, it's just like a bunch of libraries that you can build your own node with. So if you're like a node runner, I think it really depends on what okay. So I think having a bunch of implementations definitely makes it more complicated as someone who wants to work on top of Lightning, because there's just, like, not a common surface area between them all. So they all speak Lightning and they all interoperate with each other, but the features that we've kind of added on top of that as an implementation team is all slightly different. So one of the biggest differences between Core Lightning and LND for a long time, at least in terms of usability, was the fact that if you got a Core Lightning node running, you wouldn't be able to access it remotely very easily. So if you wanted to build a website where you could talk to your Core Lightning node from the website, you would have to come up with your own solution or download someone else's software. There was no standard way to talk to a C Lightning node or Core Lightning node from far away, whereas LND, which is written in Go, they set out from the very beginning, I think, one of their very first releases. They always had a way that you could talk to your Lightning node from a browser or a web app or whatever very easily. So I think that for a long time was one of the biggest differentiators between what node you were building on top of. I wish I knew what eclair does on their node. I'm pretty sure they have a way you can talk to it remotely, unlike us, but I don't know what the difference is. Yeah. So I think that difference, that basic level difference made it such that in terms of the app ecosystem, on top of we've got the protocol and the specs, and Lightning nodes all talk to each other, and then on top of that, you have people building applications that use Lightning as, like, a thing. I guess Sphinx Chat is, like, built on top of Lightning, right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:23:35:
Right.
Lisa Neigut - 00:23:36:
So which implementation you would choose to build on top of? I think for a long time was really influenced by that, and I say for a long time because we've recognized on the Core Lightning team that this is a problem. And so this release we're launching, as of this release, there will be a built in way to access your node through the web, basically. So everyone who's been waiting to build on top of core Lightning is like, great, now there's like a standardized platform. It's not going to change. I'm not going to have to run the extra software with my node. I can just use whatever the official way of communicating is, because we'll have one. We didn't have one before.
Kevin Rooke - 00:24:24:
Right. When you standardize some of these procedures, do you think this leads to maybe a deteriorating network effect for large implementations like LND? I believe right now is a majority of all nodes on the network.
Lisa Neigut - 00:24:39:
Yeah, that's right.
Kevin Rooke - 00:24:40:
Is it now less important to have one implementation over another if all the implementations begin to standardize some of these features?
Lisa Neigut - 00:24:51:
I think so, yeah. I think once you get the accessibility thing even, I think then you start differentiating on other things that have been built on top of that, so to speak. I think another big part of why the LND node is so popular is that they're the one that everyone built into their little so Umbrel, for example, is responsible for a huge percent of new nodes that come online, and they launched LND only. I don't know why they did that, but that's what they did. Most people coming online now know about LND. They know about the LND tool ecosystem, et cetera. What was the other one like? Voltage.cloud, which is a cloud provider. They only run offer LND So if you want to use tooling to spin up a bunch of Lightning nodes, et cetera, unless you're building your own infrastructure, you're pretty limited to there only being really good tooling for like or like support for LND stuff, etc. So I think that's definitely, like, you know, at some point it's like you don't really have much choice if those are like if you unless you're like buying your own server or whatever and installing it from scratch, et cetera. And you have a lot of knowledge about servers and running, that sort of stuff, et cetera. You're probably going to end up with LND because all of the packaged up stuff, for the most part, at least the most popular stuff, is all running like LND, et cetera. So I think part of will people keep running LND, et cetera. I think if all of the services that offer nodes only offer LND, no, I don't think it's going to matter what features delighting Ads if all that the Umbrel set can get access to is the LND stuff. I understand that Umbrel is like working on making C Lightning an option, which is great, but until it's an option, it's not really an option. Right. So I don't think it wouldn't matter if C Lightning was like the bees knees, et cetera. If you don't have accessibility to the software through these other services and packages, et cetera. And eclair, too, right? Like if you don't have the ability to easily install that because the things that are selling you nodes don't offer it, then yeah, no, it doesn't matter. I think what maybe our accounting bookkeeping is like best in class, whatever, and it would be really nice for most people running nodes to know which channels are earning the money and how much it's costing them to like, close channels, et cetera. Like, you know, like as an example, like our maybe our bookkeeping feature is like the best in class everywhere, but like, unless like, you have accessibility to like, get access to running a C Lightning node, that's not really does it?
Kevin Rooke - 00:27:42:
Yeah, it's like if you build a better app store and you try and convince Apple to push, they're just not doing it. You got to get them to buy in first.
Lisa Neigut - 00:27:50:
Right? Yeah. And so I think, like, Core Lightning at least has little lags, definitely. And like adoption on that tooling layer. Right. So like and like, we've gotten feedback from the voltage cloud people that they really want that RPC thing that we're adding this next release. So that's part of the reason we're adding it. The Umbrel people really want a backup feature that we haven't added for a long time. Part of the reason we haven't added it is because we don't think it's like a great backup. It's not actually a backup. It's called a backup, but it's not actually a backup. It's just like a way of. Finding people who might have information about your thing. Anyway, we've been adding this and stuff we didn't add because we were like, well, that's a little gives you some false sense of security that we didn't want people to think that they had that sense of security. So we didn't add the feature that LND had for the ways that they do. Basically, they're called static channel backups. We get a lot of people really like static channel backups because it's an easy way to back up your node. But you're not actually creating a backup. You're not really like backing up your data. You're basically copying a list of people you have channels with. And then in the case you lose all your data, this list of people you have channels with, you just go and tell your node to reconnect to all those people and then hopefully they close the channel for you and you can recover your funds that way. But that's not actually like a backup despite the fact that they're called backups. Anyways, people like them though. So part of Umbrel getting Core Lightning on there, they're like, well, we need static channel backups. And it's like, well, okay, I guess we'll have to add that then if that's the thing that you want and are used to having.
Kevin Rooke - 00:29:37:
Interesting. Now all of the Lightning implementations, or you have LDK, which is loosely tied to block that's, right? You have LND tied to Lightning Labs. You have Core Lightning tied to Blockstream. There's like corporate ties with all these implementations. Are there any incentives for corporations to promote their implementation over another? Or what's the end game there from the corporate standpoint of having a majority share or a growing share of the market?
Lisa Neigut - 00:30:17:
I think that the block team LDK and our team well, okay, let's look that it depends on where your money is coming from, I think to some extent, like where your incentives are, right? So Lightning Labs and eclair are the only two teams that have raised venture capital and have sold someone a story about how Lightning is going to change the world in XYZ way and they're going to be the firm that's doing it, right? So I think that when you every time you raise VC money, you're telling them a story. So every time you raise money from someone, you are selling them a picture of a future that you're going to build. Usually, especially in pre revenue companies, which most Lightning companies were like pre revenue when they're raising funds, right? So typically when you go and raise money, you're selling a narrative of how this is going to create a new market and how you in that market are going to dominate and then giving you the money is going to get them lots of returns, et cetera, right? I like to call this like the motivated capital problem. The way that you motivate money. How do you convince someone to give you money, right? One thing that's really motivating for capital is like the promise of more capital in the future returns. Right? So you promise them that you're going to give them returns in some way. A lot of companies in the DFI space issue tokens because that's like how they reward people investing in their platform. So a lot of crypto infrastructure projects outside of Bitcoin sell VCs on the token that they give them. So they give VCs tons of tokens that they can go sell. So the motivation for giving money to these companies is that you get tokens, but then there's liquidity later and you can sell the tokens or whatever governance things, et cetera. Anyway, that's probably ACINQ and Lightning Labs are both companies that take VC money, which means that there's some narrative that they've sold companies, I don't know what, those aren't public usually. Usually companies are pretty close tested about what they're telling their VCs, but I can imagine that whatever their incentives are, their incentives are to make sure that the story they told the VCs actually happen, right? Yeah. To kind of contrast that to the Blockstream case, and then Spiral is like another good case. The Spiral and our Blockstream projects for a large part were not core to the companies, at least historically, haven't been core to what the company is making money on. Blockstream is a Bitcoin infrastructure project we invest as a company. We have a huge research team. We probably employ more core Bitcoin devs as an organization than anyone else. Our belief in our organization puts a lot of money towards the Bitcoin ecosystem as a whole. And we saw Lightning as being a really big and important part of the Bitcoin ecosystem. So our company's investment in Lightning has been honestly pretty small because our team was only three people for a very long time. Part of the reason it was small was because we're not selling a story to VCs and then hiring a bunch of people and trying to get a bunch of people building out our vision, et cetera. We're just working on making the spec better, making sure that we implement the spec, making sure the spec process works, making sure that there's kind of a reference implementation, et cetera, of everything in the spec that's written in C, et cetera. So our focus has been we've been like adding new things to the spec, like improve Lightning from spec driven processes, et cetera. At least that's been kind of our focus as an organization. Spiral also is like a let's build, let's re implement the spec. I think they've been more mobile focused than we have on what is landing on mobile phones look like, but they're like a nonprofit e-arm of the Block organization. So I think they've never gone out and sold a story, I think, to investors, et cetera. I know they have a product guy who sees Lee who's great. He's been working really hard and having a lot of conversations with people to try and get more people using LDK because their corporate strategy, they may not be a direct revenue generator for the organization, but at some point they need to prove like adoption, right? Or that people are using the stuff that they're building. So I think for the Spiral Team, they really care about being like a reference of implementation and sort of sorts and Rust. They don't want to be a full node. If you want to use the LDK, you have to put all the parts together yourself. So it's like no batteries included. It's not like an out of the box thing. You can just set up and run and have a Lightning node. You have to know how to put all the parts together. They're hoping to be more of like the developers’ Lightning solution. So if you're building an application that you need Lightning, you can use LDK to do that anyways, you get around. Lightning Labs, I think, is obviously the one that a lot of people sort of question their motives on. One, because they have so much market share for part of the reasons we talked about earlier. The other is they are one of the few firms, like the only firm well, I shouldn't leave ACINQ out. They always get upset when we forget that they also are like VC funded and doing great things for Lightning out in France. But I think the Lightning Labs team people do really question, how are they planning to pay back their VCs? What is the narrative that they, as an organization, have they been selling, so to speak, to justify people investing in them, et cetera, right? I mean, I think a lot of companies for a long time don't make money and don't have plans to. But at some point, Uber, for example, has been selling. The fact that they're going to get made was worth a lot of money for a long time, even though they're losing a ton of money, right? And part of the way they kept raising VC capital is by saying that they were going to make self-driving cars happen, right? So they were selling like, hey, we're making self-driving cars happen. So they were allowed to go out and lose a lot of money in the taxicab business and undercut yellow cabs with a thought that the yellow calves would die out one. So no yellow cabs exist. And I have to take an Uber to become a captive market. And then at some point they were going to even cut out drivers, right, and use automated driving. I call it automated intelligence is AI, because I think artificial isn't true. It's just automated. We've figured out how to automate intelligence. So like automated drivers. So anyway, that's like the Uber pitch, right? It's like, we're going to make automated intelligence work on driving and we're going to like, become a semi monopoly by, like, getting rid of all the competition, by, like, just driving the prices down such that everyone uses Ubers and becomes, like, Uber accustomed. And then once everyone's using Uber, in theory, you can charge more money, right? There's no alternative.
Kevin Rooke - 00:37:42:
Right. So if you were building the Uber of Lightning and you had gone out and raised all this money and you had said, hey, we're going to build this implementation, and you were trying to build a monopoly from scratch and trying to become the leading implementation, what might that look like? And what could some of the negative implications be of someone taking that approach?
Lisa Neigut - 00:38:09:
Well, I think one thing, I think one part of being market dominant is that your necessity, you don't feel the need to build things everyone else is building. Like, the spec process we were talking about at the beginning has really, I think, suffered from the dominance of labs in the marketplace because they add features to their node that only other Lightning Labs nodes can use or know about. That doesn't really impact them because most people are running their implementation. So if they ship it and don't write it down and don't put it as part of the spec process and don't make it easy or documented for anyone else to pick up and reimplement, that kind of becomes like a little bit of a moat, right? Like, you don't want to leave the Lightning Labs implementation land because you'll leave this feature that they've built, but no one else can build that feature because it hasn't been added to part of the spec process. So the motivation for collaboration on a shared spec, I think, definitely goes down, because if you can build that walled garden and you can build paid services on top of that walled garden, to some extent that you've built, there's really not a lot of downsides to you doing that. Right? I think that the Lightning network would be a lot healthier if we had like 30 if each implementation had like 20% to 30% of all the nodes ran a different implementation and there wasn't a single dominant player, that would be a lot better, I think in terms of everyone needing to collaborate to move the network forward together. Does that make sense? I don't feel like I answered your question about what I would build, but I think that's, like, that was a…
Kevin Rooke - 00:39:53:
Really good color, though. I appreciate that perspective. Do you then worry at all about centralization? I guess there's a few different ways you can centralize the Lightning Network. If we're thinking about the network at large here, one could be through just having a market leader or a dominant market leader in implementations. You could also have just a handful of nodes that have all the activity on the network that are kind of like the hubs of the network. Do you worry about centralization in any context on the light network today?
Lisa Neigut - 00:40:29:
Yeah, I do centralization. So there's two ways that the centralization works. One one is by the type of software people are running whatever. The other is by where the capital, new capital, is being committed to the network, right? And where that capital gets deployed to a large extent, really, what do you call it, shapes your ability to receive and send payments. Right? So earlier I was talking about the Liquidity Ads decentralized marketplace that I have built or added to C Lightning, basically. And someone built a really cool UI on top of it. There's like a web page where you can go and look at everyone offering Liquidity Ads and stuff. It's like totally decentralized. There's no central party. It's built on top of the Lightning protocol such that everyone gets the information about how much inbound you're doing, et cetera. But if it became really hard for you as a node to get inbound liquidity, getting inbound Liquidity means you convincing another node that has some other party that owns Bitcoin to take that bitcoin and commit it to your financial purposes, or maybe theirs or whatever. But you basically have to find someone to convince them to give you inbound capacity such that you can receive Lightning payments. And until you figure out how to do that, you can't transact on Lightning. So we built Liquidity Ads to try and make it a spec level, saying that everyone could use the same marketplace to sell and buy it. Lightning Labs has built a competing product called Pool, which is totally different mechanics in terms of how you buy it, but solving the same problem where you can buy inbound stuff. But if you make it such that the only way that you could buy and find inbound Liquidity was through Lightning Labs' Pool thing, which they haven't written a spec for how to work with Pool. I don't know of any other Lightning implementation that's tried to make it such that your node. So if you're running a core Lightning node, you can't buy inbound liquidity using the Pool ad stuff, right? If everyone who has capital that they want to deploy onto the Lightning Network is putting it into Pool, that means that you, as a Lightning node running any other implementation, suddenly can't get access to all these people that are willing to pay you to put capacity, inbound capacity to your node, right? So that becomes in and of itself like a huge moat. Which is why the Liquidity Ads is so important, is because it creates like an open network, openly accessible. There's a specification. Any node can implement the specification and participate in the network. The people at ACINQ, it's on their roadmap to add it this year, so that if you're running an ACINQ node, you can participate in this open billboard system for sourcing liquidity, et cetera. But if no one's selling Liquidity through that market, and it's all being sold through Pool, then as a Lightning node operator, your ability to receive inbound payments is going to be extremely limited. Right.
Kevin Rooke - 00:43:42:
I see. That's really interesting. What role do you think when you think about nodes on the network today? I think a lot of them are hobbyist, Umbrel nodes. Like that was a huge driver of node growth this year. What do you think the role of kind of this hobbyist node is over time on the lightning network? Do you buy into the idea of personal servers that eventually get to the point where everyone's running one? Do you think there's only a handful of kind of large institutions running Lightning nodes? What's your perspective on that?
Lisa Neigut - 00:44:17:
Yeah, I think that the hobbyist running nodes is incredibly huge and incredibly important for the know how of how Lightning works and how to run Lightning nodes for the industry as a whole. We need all that education that's going on with everyone learning how to send and receive payments independently. I think without that we're not going to get the step change function in people accepting Lightning across mom and pop shops. I think it's where it's really going to kind of maybe grassroots level of whatever. And if we want as many people on Lightning as I think as possible, I think having thousands of people who have run nodes and understand how it works is like the most important thing. It would be if it was just like the exchanges running nodes and it was like kind of this small backbone of big nodes that send and receive most payments between each other. I think that would be fine and that would probably achieve some of the goals of scaling Bitcoin. But I don't think that that would be achieving our decentralization goals as an ecosystem. Right. Like Bitcoiners want things to be decentralized. And part of decentralization with Lightning is because these nodes are so much more work intensive than running a bitcoin node. To some extent you just set up a bitcoin node and it goes, right? You don't have to manage a bitcoin node, you just have to make sure you update it every six months and whatever. But actually running and managing a Lightning node is a lot more work. And so I would say that I don't know what the long term viability of having those little operators is, but I think that it makes it really, Lightning is the most decentralized layer two crypto network that exists today. And 85% of that 95% of that is because of all these small hobbyists operators who are trying to earn some extra stats, right? They're like, hey, I can do some work. I think ideally you'd be able to set your money into your Lightning node and forget it. It would magically earn you more Bitcoin. I don't think that's the case at all for good reasons, but I think that promise, this is the motivated capital thing I was talking about earlier. Like Bitcoiners who hold bitcoin, loose bunch of bitcoin were motivated to try to do Lightning because they could earn more bitcoin with their bitcoin. It's like a really kind of compelling story there. And this is why the bookkeeping stuff that I've been working on I think is so important is because people need good data, I think, in order to understand where their costs are. And is that actually happening? How can they? I think bookkeeping data in the short term might loses some Core Lightning users as they realize how much they're losing to chain fees. But the goal is that in the long term, it will make people much, much smarter about how they deploy their capital and figure out nicer strategies. And maybe we'll even get improvements to the Lightning node protocol from people who are now able to see where all their costs are, and they come up with better ways that we can handle money and costs on Lightning. And everyone wins, if that makes sense. So the bookkeeping thing is like a long term I've been joking that this is like an effort to get more people to work on Core Lightning because they'll see that they're losing money and start digging into it and then want to contribute about patches to Core Lightning to make it more cost efficient.
Kevin Rooke - 00:47:55:
Interesting.
Lisa Neigut - 00:47:56:
The long term goal of it, I think I totally don't remember you're talking about the hobbyists, but yeah, so I think the hobbyists are super, super important and I think that their role is maybe in terms of massive amount of capital that's being passed around on the network in the long term won't be as much. I think that all of that knowledge and know-how and that body of community of people who understand Lightning is so important for our ability to grow this to like a national, international network.
Kevin Rooke - 00:48:27:
Yeah. Do you have any insight into what form factor Lightning nodes might take on over time? Like, are they going to be in phones? Are they going to be right now? Are they in clouds? Or?
Lisa Neigut - 00:48:42:
Two super exciting two projects that I'm super excited about. One is one that we're working on at Blockstream. I mentioned earlier how for a long time we've been working on kind of just like having the best spec node that we could possibly have. We didn't really care if you could connect to it from remote or whatever. That wasn't the point. The point is we would have like the best Lightning node for a long time. Christian Decker, who's worked on Lightning forever and has been in the bitcoin space before bitcoin existed, basically, Dr. Bitcoin, he's the first PhD in bitcoin. Fun fact about Christian. Yeah. So he's been around for a long time. He had this incredible idea and he's been working on it in Blockstream for the last year or two to build this node infrastructure project called Greenlight. So if we make money on Lightning, it's going to be through renting servers on Greenlight. So our product motive, at least in the core Lightning side, is like, we want you running Greenlight. But the awesome thing about Greenlight is that it decouples who has the signing keys for Lightning versus who's running that node infrastructure. So the really cool thing about this is you can build really interesting mobile wallet, use cases, or build Lightning Node infrastructure into browsers now where you still have your private keys you have to keep secret, et cetera. But those live on your wallet or they live on your phone or they live in your browser, but all the infrastructure. So running a Lightning Node is really quite complicated in terms of Node up time. Your Node has to be up all the time. Somebody needs to be making sure that no one's trying to steal your money and your channels. There's a lot of like you need to be able to get all this data about what the network looks like so you can send payments. Backups are really important. If you lose your backups, you lose all your money, which is terrible. But Greenlight the whole idea behind Greenlight is that we will build out all of this enterprise grade infrastructure to manage a lot of those problems for you, help with channel liquidity, et cetera. Give you access to, I don't know, maybe the Liquidity ad marketplace so you can buy and inbound Liquidity fees yourself. But we won't actually touch any of the money, so to speak, because you will own the keys. So I think that's really cool. So this is like kind of like HSM proxy so that's like hardware signing module will be separated from the actual node. So I think that's one thing I'm really excited about. I think it's going to hopefully make a certain amount of building on Lightning a lot easier because some of the management of the complicated part is abstracted away and so now you can build more interesting things on top of that because you don't have to manage any of that stuff. The other project that I'm really excited about so Greenlight is coming hopefully soon, I think we're making an announcement about a new partner sometime in Miami this week. I don't know how much I'm allowed to talk about that, but hopefully that's all really exciting stuff that's coming. The other side of it that the other project that I saw come out lately that I thought was really cool and interesting from a kind of this like community hobbyist side of things that you're talking about is this project called Sensei that got launched recently. It was built using the LDK, which, as I was talking about earlier, like, batteries not included. Like you have to be a dev to use LDK, but it lets you kind of take Lightning stuff and build ideally like new and interesting things with the LDK. This developer I think is a pseudonym called John Cantrell. Belongs to this thing called Sensei, which is a Lightning node that you as your community block person, like block mom or whatever, could run the Lightning node and handle. Like I was saying, there's a lot of complexity on backups, on making sure the keys don't get lost, on making sure you have inbound outbound liquidity for the node so people can actually send in and receive payments. There's a lot of management that goes around like a Lightning node. The cool thing is Sensei lets you I think Sensei kind of means like master in Japanese, right? It's like the knowledgeable older guru. So what it lets you do is run a Lightning node that you can then. So let's say there's like the Lightning Sensei and maybe this is someone from the hobbyist, like Plebnet, right, who runs this node and then can hand out mini nodes, like mini accounts off of their Sensei node to people in their family or community or co-op or whatever. So you can have a Lightning wallet and account with money in it. That's your money. But I guess both of these are basically outsourcing the node infrastructure, difficult part to someone else. And greenlight, in the case of green light, it's the Blockstream of our, I'm going to say enterprise grade software in a cloud somewhere where sensitivity to John down the street who's going to be your neighborhood Lightning mom and just manage the node for everyone in their community. So both of these I think you're taking some of the complexity of Lightning and abstracting it away and I think really interesting and also interesting ways that is really interesting.
Kevin Rooke - 00:54:12:
I want to hear your perspective on the different applications that Lightning nodes or even bitcoin nodes will support over time. Because right now I've started to notice this personal server movement starting to pick up steam and now all of a sudden it's like you have this little box in your home or you have a node somewhere else and it can do more than just Lightning. Like do you think that this is going to be a foundation upon which we build this Web3 or kind of next generation of the Internet or what's your perspective on that?
Lisa Neigut - 00:54:48:
I think that's a great question. I don't have any amazing insights. I think more people being able to run Internet infrastructure, whatever that means, from their houses is great. And anything, any kind of like software or project and like it would make sense to me that money, digital money, would be the one that makes more people do more home computing, right? Because you want management of your own finances, et cetera. So it doesn't surprise me that Lightning is the thing that's making this renewed interest in decentralized home based computing a thing. I think that it's a little too early to see how sticky that is and how big those communities go. To be one of my good friends who's kind of like the internet philosopher. His name is Venkat. He goes by VGR, has been talking a lot about like the great weirding, how like the last I want to say maybe the last seven years and I think this decade are going to be like things are just getting weird. I think the pandemic sort of accelerated it. And weirdness is like almost like minicults cults is probably a little bit of a strong word, but just like people with strong interests about weird stuff that you've never heard of, that you discover that that's like a whole thing and you're like, what? Okay, so I guess what I'm trying to say is why I bring that up is I think that I'm not sure how much of the home infrastructure stuff is like, I definitely think it's like part of this great weirding and that more things are going to be decentralized, more people. There's going to be I think there is going to be a larger number of people that run a lot of their personal infrastructure at home and there's like that that is a reasonable thing to expect you will be able to do. And I think that these companies that are building out projects on top of Lightning nodes are probably the first wave of that. I don't know how sticky that's going to be, so I'm not really sure how to calculate that into things, whatever. But yeah, I think it's great and I think, like, it's really a no brainer. I hadn't really thought about it much, but I think that like, Lightning nodes have to be like on all the time. So if you're running a hobbyist Lightning node, you need infrastructure that is up all the time. You have this always on computing need and it's based on money. So you have motivation to make sure that it stays up. Like I said, it makes sense to me. So people used to run websites from their house, but if your website goes down, it sucks because no one can read your content that bad. Maybe you can't get to your files you had at home and you needed them while you're traveling. That's awful. But money being on your computer and you needing access to your money all the time I think is going to have a huge impact on homebase computing. Yeah, 100%. Or maybe we rediscover clouds or maybe local computer clubs pop up. Like, the sensei thing. And actually the bookkeeping data, I've been doing some kind of like the bookkeeping data is going to be the first data project on C Lightning that you will be able to that is kind of Web3, like, because you'll be able to I don't know, I'm working with some stuff. But all that accounting data lives with your node, right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:58:15:
Right. You've got this accessible dashboard that you're just pulling in a hackathon.
Lisa Neigut - 00:58:17:
A few weekends ago, I was working with a friend to make a. Dashboard for it. I don't know if we'll actually finish that project. I have a million things going on, but it was so cool to be able to. And the cool thing about that dashboard project, Kevin, is that I can write the dashboard software and host it on some global Internet cloud computer, whatever. No one cares, right? And that's like all the like, what does it look like, how does the views look like? What kind of graphs can you see of it, et cetera. But all the data, all of your accounting data for your Node lives on your node, wherever in the world your Node is, right? So it's at home. We don't have it. We can create these beautiful graphs that you can log in with your credentials from your node, and then the web page will go directly from there's this cool stuff that this guy named Will, he's jb55 on Twitter has been working on. It's building on top of some work that Rusty did, but it basically lets you connect to your Lightning node from your browser in this really quick, great way so I can get all that data that you're hosting at home. It never has to be like all of your accounting data. You can see beautifully on this app that someone else wrote that's hosted on. If I'm a Lightning node runner, I just have to run my node, right? I don't have to set up any web infrastructure. I don't have to download any software packages or anything. I can just go to a web page, pop in a little bit of information and some credentials that tell you how to find my node, and gives it some authentication to access that data. And then all of a sudden, I can see all of my data and I don't have to share it with anyone. It's just literally going from whatever web browser I'm on to my node, wherever it is in the world.
Kevin Rooke - 01:00:04:
Yeah. Is that project you're mentioning, is that LN Link?
Lisa Neigut - 01:00:07:
Yes. Well, LN Link, LN Link is built on top of the exact same thing. It's like LN's Socket is technically like the GitHub project, but yeah, so he has a JavaScript version of it that we were using to build up our accounting dashboard. So you just pop in a little bit of connection information about how to get your node to your node, which is usually already public. And then you have to do a little bit of setup on your C Lightning node, like a little bit of extra set up to get this authentication string that I can then pop into the website. So then when the website goes to the website, it's not my server that's hosting the web page, but your browser talks directly to your Lightning node completely securely. It's using better stuff than SSL, which is super cool. I don't know, I get super excited about it. Yeah, it's so cool. I think the web thing. Three thing is real. I think this accounting data stuff is, like, the right frontier of what is the obvious data that your node has that you want to be able to see from anywhere, but you don't want to share with anyone. You don't want anyone to have your payment data.
Kevin Rooke - 01:01:18:
That's really interesting. You got my head spinning with ideas. Is there one particular Lightning application or idea that you want to see built that no one's taken a stab at yet?
Lisa Neigut - 01:01:35:
I think people have taken a stab at it, but oh, God, my projects are always a little strange. I don't feel like I'm, like a typical but okay. Will Catherine is building LN Link wallet you were talking about. I am so freaking excited about that, but mostly because I don't really have I mean, there's some software that you can control your node with a phone from, but I'm really bad about installing and running other people's software. I haven't done it. So I'm really excited about this iOS app that is going to be my direct link to my core Lightning node. Those doped. I really wish that there was an equivalent thing for browsers, like the browser version, MetaMask is like the I think there's, like, a version of MetaMask that is like the lightning MetaMask. And I think, like, Willow Brown.
Kevin Rooke - 01:02:34:
Referred to Alby.
Lisa Neigut - 01:02:36:
No, I haven't checked into Alby. Maybe that's it. But I was going to say there's, like, a version of MetaMask that is the Lightning dashboard, and maybe that's built using LN socket. And you can just connect and see all of your stuff from your Lightning node using LNsocket. Maybe it's albi. I haven't checked that out. It seems really great. I think the guys who are working on that are awesome. But yeah, I don't know. There's some stuff in Lightning wallet. It doesn't exist quite yet that I think that will make like and a lot of that is using, like, bolt twelve stuff. I don't know. But yeah, I think the payment integration with BOLT12 and stuff hasn't been totally solved yet, and I think that would be great to get done.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:23:
Interesting. Okay, I want to make sure we get some time to talk about Base58 and the work you're doing there.
Lisa Neigut - 01:03:29:
Oh, yeah, that's cool.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:31:
No, this is a fascinating conversation. I'm really enjoying this, but I want to make sure we get to it. You're branding this as on your homepage. Here it is the world's best Bitcoin education company. I want to learn more about exactly what you're building and what your vision for Bitcoin education is.
Lisa Neigut - 01:03:50:
Yeah, this is a great question. Okay, so Base58 is take one step back. So when people talk about bitcoin education, one thing that kind of occurred to me is a lot of people, when they talk about learn about bitcoin, I think they mean it in a I would almost say, like liberal arts economists. Learn about monetary policy. Learn about what sound money is. Learn about how bitcoin lets you hold money for yourself for the first time. Those are all, I think, really important things to learn about. But that's not what I'm talking about when I say Bitcoin education, right? And I think the easy way to kind of understand the difference there is almost if you look at people talk about liberal arts versus Stem education, and there's always like, well, there's the liberal arts side, and it's like, is liberal arts worth anything? And then there's like, the Stem side, and then they learn how to build stuff, et cetera. I think a lot of people, when they say Bitcoin education are talking more about the liberal arts side of it. And the sound money stuff is, like, the economics side of things, which is, like, super important. But that's not what we do at Base58. Base58 aims to be the premier institution for learning about the STEM side of Bitcoin education. So if you want to understand how Bitcoin transactions work, like, what is a Bitcoin transaction? What does it look like? What goes into it? How do you write them? How do you write? Like, we go through we spend, like, the second or third week. Maybe it's the second week. We get into like, oh, man, we talk about all of my favorite things. I'll be like, oh, this is my favorite thing. And then I'll be like, oh, this next week. But this is also my favorite thing. But one of my favorite things that we talk about in class is we talk about script, which is how you write, like, locks on your Bitcoin. Like, how do you make it such that only you can spend that Bitcoin? We talk about how to write those so you get to see us, like, put them together piece by piece, like building block wise. We write our own scripts. We unlock our own scripts. We learn all about what is a signature? What is a digital signature, right? What does it mean to sign a transaction? Where does crypto come into this? We learn about crypt, like, the elliptic curve stuff, and I go, like, I am a really I like to think I'm, like, a really good educator. I mean, I spent one of my first jobs in high school was, like, tutoring math. I taught geometry for eight years. When I was at Square Cash App, I started a little club that we would meet every week and talk about Bitcoin fundamentals. As I was learning it, everyone else was like, I've been teaching and learning about Bitcoin for, like, a while now. So Base58 is like, all the stuff I wish someone had told me when I started working on stuff and Lightning. But I'd like to think that we do it. We go super in depth. You learn everything about SegWit. You learn everything there is to know about SegWit. You learn everything there is about, for the most part, about legacy transactions. And we do it in six weeks, hopefully. It's super fun. Everyone who took my class, we just finished, I just finished the first class ever. Ten people. We went through six weeks. Everyone was like, this is great. Someone was like, this is the most fun I've had in a class in, like, forever. Because I have a lot of fun talking about all this stuff. And I think that definitely comes through. But yeah, so we aim to be the place that you can learn. I don't just teach. I teach you all the parts and how they all go together, but I also know the story behind them, if that makes sense. We're not just talking about stuff where I explain why is it that way? And I think, hopefully the hope with Base58 is, one, we can get a lot more people involved in understanding exactly what goes into these transactions and stuff. The hope with that is that I kind of say it's not a programming class. We don't actually use any programming languages. We're not looking at code. We're looking at data from the blockchain. So the idea is that you take this class and you learn all about how Bitcoin data is structured and how it's put together with the idea that then if you ever look at any software that's built on top of those data structures. You know enough about the underlying layer of how the data is put together that you can build on top of bitcoin in whatever language you want. You don't have to know, like, Python or C++ or whatever. You could write it in, like, I don't know, I'm going to say, like, Darmuck or something. That's not even a programming language.
Kevin Rooke - 01:08:40:
You're learning more than just, like, memorizing the steps. You're actually understanding the principles and the reasoning and why you're doing it.
Lisa Neigut - 01:08:48:
Yeah. And so that's what we teach in Base58. And the goal is that more people will be able to participate in conversations on the Bitcoin mailing list because they understand what we're talking about. I don't think enough people understand what the covenants thing is. There's like, a certain part of the class that we talk about. I don't think any other class that I've seen covers it. We covered stick hashes and we go into them pretty in depth. We spend like a week on them. And that's because I think they're super important for understanding covenants. These are, like, the precursor to understanding what a covenant is.
Kevin Rooke - 01:09:24:
That's really fascinating. I want to highlight something that I saw on Twitter. I think you got the sponsorship initiative.
Lisa Neigut - 01:09:32:
Oh, yes.
Kevin Rooke - 01:09:33:
Because I think, correct me if I'm wrong, the program is six weeks and is 2400 per student. Right. And you go through his application process. Can anyone apply? You have to have a technical background. What's the yeah.
Lisa Neigut - 01:09:46:
So our class is open to anyone who wants to sign up and pay me money or money, whatever, you can just get in and come hang out. We'll have a great time. It's going to be super fun. You pay less. I think it's close to $2,000 if you pay in bitcoin. FYI. OPkay, we were talking a little bit about this, I think, before recording. Running Base58 is something that I do kind of in my spare time. I have a full time at Blockstream working on CLightning stuff. One thing, it turns out I really love showing up to class and teaching is like an hour and a half, and I can do that a couple of times a week. And I don't have to do a lot of prep work because it's like all material I know really well, and we all do it live. There's no slides or anything. It's all like live. Watching things get put together, that's great. The hard thing, it turns out, about running a school is like getting people to sign up for the classes. Part of that is going on in shows like this where I talk about it and people hear about it and they get excited and they come show up. But that takes a lot of time. And so me doing this sponsorship thing was an attempt to try and get more people into classes without me having to spend as much time doing advertising. The whole idea is the way the sponsorship works. This kind of speaks to some grander ambitions we have with Base58, which is to help educate people who are developers on bitcoin and then help them get jobs in bitcoin. So the whole thing is, hopefully we'll be able to sign on some companies that are looking to hire bitcoin jobs and have them pay us a recruiting fee for doing all this education work that we're doing. Right? So ideally, we'll have vetted one will, I've gotten to interact with you, so I kind of have an opinion about how smart, about what your skills are, et cetera. And then you're also paying for all this education that they've just gotten from me. So you have an understanding of what the base level of their understanding of bitcoin is, or at least what they've been exposed to. So from a recruiting, the whole pitch is to if you're looking to hire devs that you want to work on your bitcoin project, you should come hire someone from Base58 who's gone through our classes, because we can help you figure out who in our cohort is the right fit for your job. And you know that they're pretty knowledgeable about bitcoin at this point, right? So they can get into your projects faster. So anyway, so the idea is that we'll create basically this recruiting pipeline. And if you sponsor someone through the class, which means pay for them to go to the class, and they get recruited out afterwards, we will double your money, we will pay you back how much you paid for the class and then pay you back enough for another seat, so to speak. So the whole idea is this helps us get more people who want to take the class and maybe for whatever reason don't have the money or don't want to for whatever reason aren't willing to bet on themselves to take the class themselves. I think it gives people who love Bitcoin and want to see more people getting into Bitcoin but don't know how to do that, an opportunity to get involved and participate in this education effort by sponsoring someone, which is really cool. We've had a bunch of people who are like, this is great, like, yes, I want more people learning about Bitcoin, I will just pay you the money. And then I've done some work the last few weeks to try and get a pipeline going of people that are interested, right? So now I've got candidates that I can like, okay, if you've got money, you want to help educate someone in Bitcoin, we have people we can put in class now, so to speak.
Kevin Rooke - 01:13:16:
Right, that's a really cool idea because it's literally investing in education. Like you invest in your own education, but people think of that as like, oh, I'm going to read books all day or I'm going to go to class or something. And now there's literally do you think this becomes an investment class more broadly in education, we could see a time where if you have capital, you can invest it in other people's education and kind of help them get an education and potentially make a return on it if they succeed.
Lisa Neigut - 01:13:51:
This is sort of like gets into education loans, right? To some extent, that's sort of what an education loan is supposed to be to some extent, right? And I think you've seen things with, they call them ISA, which is like, you promise that some amount of your money that you've, you make in your next job goes back to the organization that trained you. And so you saw this Lambda School, which I think they got renamed, they actually had a lot of trouble Lambda School, they got in a lot of trouble and they renamed because I think they had a lot of trouble with this sort of thing. So I don't really like the thing I like about this is one, Base58 is really not that expensive. It might seem like a lot sticker shock wise, but when you look at your other education options, Base58 is really not a lot of money. The other thing is that what are they going to say here? I think there's like a direct path from going to Base58 to getting a job if you have some dev experience already. So I think it's a lot easier for us to offer that as an investment opportunity. One, because I think there's a lot of devs out there that want to get into Bitcoin and we can provide them some education to get their feet wet and make sure they've got the right orientation into how it works as a system and then connect them to companies that want to hire people. I don't know if that's true for every type of education, though. So while I think it's a great fit for what we're doing at Base58, I don't know how you scale that. So much of being a dev just from my personal experience is like, on the job training and learning stuff on the job, et cetera. And it's really hard to know who's going to be good to hire out of, like, I don't know.
Kevin Rooke - 01:15:34:
Right, okay. I got one more question for you. If you could teach, maybe this is like, students learning about Bitcoin. If you could share one lesson with them or focus on one topic, what would be that primary or kind of like first topic that you teach someone about?
Lisa Neigut - 01:15:56:
Well, okay. About bitcoin.
Kevin Rooke - 01:15:59:
Yeah, sure.
Lisa Neigut - 01:16:00:
We're talking about the basics. We have a prerequisite class that's like pre-recorded and I send it to everyone who is going to come through Base58. So maybe that's like, where it would start. Maybe. Okay. And it's not bitcoin related. It's like so incredibly helpful for understanding computer protocols, though. Sounds weird, but this is almost like basic computer knowledge that I think more people well, it sort of depends on what you want to do with computers, but if you want to work on stuff like Bitcoin, it's like really important knowledge to have. And if that's on encodings and Indianness sounds completely strange and crazy and weird, but I promise you, if you nail understanding of what encodings are and how Indians works with that because they're really related, it's just kind of funny. I was like, these are the two topics you need to know before you can take Base58. You really need to know these. This will make your life in Base58 so much easier because this is 95% of what we do is encode things in different ways. It's basically translating them between two different things. All we do is translate stuff all day long. But it's also really good for just understanding a lot of the work that computers do. Anyways, when I put those two topics up, as I said, you need to know these two things and then I'm really terrible sometimes I just sort of hop into teaching stuff and get halfway through it and be like, like, oh, wait, I really should have practiced this. So I had these two things I wanted to teach and then I started doing this hour and a half, like, prerequisites, like recording live for people who signed up for my class. And by the end of it, I don't know, it just worked out beautifully. It's like one of the most impressive things I think I've ever done in tutoring, and I did it off the seat of my pants or whatever. And I think it's a great explanation of how encoding work and how Indiana works. But, yeah, I don't know, that's where I would start. Yeah, that's the super most exciting thing about bitcoin. Whatever.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:06:
Now, for anyone who wants to get started, where can they learn more about Base58 and where can they follow you?
Lisa Neigut - 01:18:12:
Yeah, I'm on Twitter. I'm @niftynei nifty N-I-F-T-Y-N-E-I @niftynei. On Twitter, I tweet all sorts of random shit. So if you want to follow me, be prepared for some weirdness. But if you want to hang out on Base58 or join our class, we currently still have lake spots for our next class, which starts April 11, which is super soon. You can find us on our website at Base58. Info info. We're also on Twitter at Base58. And that's 58. Just like the two numbers. Base58. BTC on the Internet.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:49:
Love it. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really learned a ton. Great. I can tell you're meant for educating, because I learned so much in just the last hour and a half. So I really appreciate all the insight and hope we can do this again sometime soon.
Lisa Neigut - 01:19:04:
Great. Same. Thanks, Kevin.
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