Kevin Rooke - 00:00:00:
Sam Walker is a senior software engineer at Strike and the creator of a new app called Reacher, which aims to solve email spam with Lightning payments. In our conversation, Sam and I got into exactly how Reacher works. We discussed how Lightning payments can not only solve email spam, but spam across the entire Internet. And we discussed some of the business models that may emerge on a Lightning powered Internet. I also set Sam up on Fountain, so he's got an account he's added to the show split. So if you guys are enjoying this show, if you learn something new, the best way you can let us know is by sending in stats, comments, and questions. All the stats you send in will be split 50 50 between Sam and I, and all the questions and comments will be visible to both of us. Just a quick shout out before we get into today's show. This episode is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Zebedee. That's Zebedee. And Zebedee is your portal into the world of bitcoin gaming. Hope you enjoy the show. Sam I'm so excited that Reacher is out into the wild. I saw it yesterday and I knew I had to talk to you and learn more about it. Can you explain for listeners who haven't tried it yet, what Reacher is and how it works?
Sam Walker - 00:01:24:
Okay, so I think of it like putting a stamp on an email. So the big problem I'm trying to solve is the problem of spam and not your typical bot spam. I think the email services do a pretty good job weeding that out, but the spam from people who want to contact you, but you don't necessarily want to hear from them, and you're not getting any value from them by receiving that email. An analogy is putting a stamp on an email and instead of paying the Postmaster general, you pay the person that is receiving the email. So, yeah, that's it. So signing up for a Reacher email, you would go to reacher.me. You log in with your Strike account, which, full disclosure, I work for Strike and these are my opinions, not theirs. And you get to choose your email, your reacher.me email. And then you tell Reacher where you want those emails forwarded to. So any email address, whether it's work or personal, and then somebody sends an email to that email address, they get a response back saying, if you want so your email has not been received yet, you need to add a tip for the email to reach its destination. So. Yeah, that's Reacher.
Kevin Rooke - 00:03:33:
How did you decide that you wanted to build this? What was the moment where you were like, this just has to be built.
Sam Walker - 00:03:41:
If you talk to any of my past coworkers who have emailed me or who have talked about email with me, I've always had a hard time with it because there's no friction you get being in the tech industry for a lot of years, I had gotten emails upon emails and phone calls upon phone calls from recruiters. And I'm not looking for a job, so leave me alone. Right. But they still come in, they're personalized, they come into my inbox. I have to read what it says and know if I'm even a qualified candidate for this job that I'm not looking for. Right. And among a lot of other types of communication. Right. And so I realized that in order to achieve something like this, you would have to be able to make very small payments. Right. And you think about having people send an email and having one service that collects their payments is just not let me turn off my notifications here. Sorry. To expect them to provide their credit card information or I'll be using PayPal or something like that. Just didn't seem achievable. And I started at Strike last December, and the Strike API had recently been released, which is what Twitter is using to send and receive tips through Twitter. Right. And they opened it up. There's kind of this ongoing hackathon at Strike where you can receive credentials for the API and build whatever you want with it. And it was pretty soon after kind of understanding what the Strike API was and having kind of seen how it works on Twitter and some other use cases. Thought this is the moment, right, where you could use it for email.
Kevin Rooke - 00:06:26:
Yeah. So what's your vision for Reacher now? Is your plan to expand into all these different verticals that you can kind of set up paywalls on? I know there's applications that are taking a stab at similar verticals, or I know there's Vida that is trying to kind of get into messaging and live streaming and calls. And then there's Reacher now on email, I imagine there's a bunch of different verticals where you could insert a paywall on Lightning and just make it so that you're not going to get bombarded with spam. Is your plan to expand verticals or double down on email?
Sam Walker - 00:07:05:
I think initially really solved the email problem because one thing, Jack did his post yesterday, and before his post yesterday, there were a few, just a handful of people using it. And as you can imagine, a guy like Jack with the reach that he has, no pun intended, it kind of exploded, right. I think got like 650 new people sign up for Reacher emails in the last day. And that was I checked a while ago. So it really kind of exploded. And it's interesting, once people start using something, you find out reasons why people see value in something that you didn't expect. And a lot of people are wanting to use it as their primary email in a lot of cases, which I thought might be the case for some interesting people. Not really like the main use, but there have been lots and lots of people who have said, I want to put it on my netflix account. I don't really know why somebody would want to put it on their Netflix account and all these other services, but I guess with a lot of the hacks that have happened, if some hacker finds your reacher email address, then they can spam you and then they'd have to pay some money to get a hold of you. Right, I'm seeing that just focusing on the email use case could take a while to really nail that. Right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:09:12:
Yeah, well, you can add me to the list of people who want it as a primary email because I think that'd be very cool to have basically like, I also don't want to receive netflix promotions and stuff that they just send constantly. So it could even block that out if they're not willing to pay a fee that I set in my email inbox. Maybe we can get into now, like a conversation around why now, why this is happening now, why this is going to work. When we've had past iterations of trying to solve email, going way back to HashCash. More recently, Balaji had a company called I think it was earned.com, it rebranded a few times, but their idea was similar, trying to put paywalls in front of I think they were mostly celebrities and well known people in the tech space at the time. But why have those attempts failed, do you think? And what do you think now reacher is doing differently as a reason that reacher may succeed?
Sam Walker - 00:10:18:
Yeah, but I can't say that I know all the history of different attempts, super well, but from what I researched and what I've heard, and I got some naysayers when this was first coming out, they've already tried this and it failed. I think it comes down to a couple of things. One is, especially if you just look at the bitcoin use case, there have been some creative solutions where you could use bitcoin to enable something like this. But I think part of it is speed to delivery. Right before Lightning, just waiting for that bitcoin to settle and kind of seeing that bitcoin come across. I think it kind of was beyond the threshold of your average user who wants to use email. They don't want to send an email and have somebody get it hours from now. They want to send it and they want to know that it got received. And I think the other side of that is also how, I guess, complicated and geeky. It's probably not the best term, but really you just you kind of had to be more savvy technically, than your average person could be to fulfill a bitcoin transaction. And it wasn't until recently that a lot of these Lightning solutions and a lot of these wallets just allow you to click a link and they'll pull up the wallet and then you send your bitcoin. I would say those are probably the two biggest factors, but I don't know.
Kevin Rooke - 00:12:47:
Yeah. Do you have a sense for what this paywall on email could enable for email? Is this going to open up new markets or new opportunities for people to use email in different ways? One thing that I keep thinking of is advertising on email, where I think it does exist in some capacity on Gmail. But it's you know, as a user, I'm getting nothing for seeing these ads. And now that there's a paywall in place, I can easily see a future where I can fill up my demographic data, my personal info, provide it to reach her, and say, if anyone wants to advertise to me, let them. But here's my paywall. I'm saying it's $5 per message. So if someone thinks it's worth it to target me with an ad and pay $5 to get to me, bring them on. I'm happy to read them.
Sam Walker - 00:13:54:
Right? Yeah.
Kevin Rooke - 00:13:56:
Do you think that's realistic? Is that going to be a big market for emails?
Sam Walker - 00:14:03:
Possibly. I think it could enable advertisements in a different way, so Gmail or Hotmail are not the ones benefiting from the ads. You could actually have somebody on either side kind of benefiting from that advertisement, where if you want to get a hold of somebody instead of having to pay the entire Lightning invoice, maybe advertisers are actually just kind of if you think about those link sharing services where they throw an ad in the middle of it, you can enable something like that and have it Lightning enabled as well, where advertisers are just paying little bits for these ads and there's not this Google in the middle of that advertising relationship. Right. I think it could get really interesting if you don't have Google in the middle of that relationship kind of monitoring what's being advertised.
Kevin Rooke - 00:15:32:
It also might shift the power dynamic that exists today, where all the advertising dollars, they flow to these Internet properties. So like Google or Facebook or Twitter, and they just stop there. They just never get to the user. It's just being entirely absorbed. I think the only one that would be meaningful, like paying out a meaningful chunk of their ad dollars would be YouTube. That pays creators, I believe, 55% of the ad dollars that are shown on their videos. But everyone else, it's zero. It's like literally zero. And I have a feeling I'd love to know if you feel the same way, that if we look back on this ten years from now, we're going to think it's absolutely crazy that we got none of this money. Like, these companies are now some of the wealthiest companies in the world, and we we got $0 for for getting them there. It's just to me, that's crazy.
Sam Walker - 00:16:36:
Yeah. So I guess that's that's one benefit that the decentralization of this money and these transactions could enable you to the advertisers would maybe pay less, and the people who are seeing those ads could get some benefit out of them potentially, and cut out the middlemen.
Kevin Rooke - 00:17:08:
Now, do you think this could be a meaningful source of income for someone? Because I was doing a little digging on Facebook's average, basically the revenue per user on Facebook and in America, if you're an average user on Facebook, Facebook is earning over $100 from you per year. And so I'm like, this is all of a sudden this isn't, you know, it's not going to be that's not a full income. Maybe it maybe it helps you pay your bills or something. But like maybe it's just like a nice little bonus at the end of the month that every month Reacher kicks back. You can collect $20 a month or something from receiving these emails. And all of a sudden it kind of flips the the dynamic around. Like instead of paying 10 or $20 to access some Internet service like a Netflix, you can maybe earn ten or $20. And all of a sudden I could see how there could be multiple companies built like this where users are able to earn and it just like kind of just money is just flowing their way as they participate and as they provide value to the companies that have previously been extracting value from them for the last decade.
Sam Walker - 00:18:33:
Yeah, I hadn't really thought of it like that, where you could flip the bottle and people watching Hulu could make money the more they watch, and you could make a decent chunk of change sitting on the couch watching Hulu.
Kevin Rooke - 00:18:56:
It's wild.
Sam Walker - 00:18:57:
Yeah.
Kevin Rooke - 00:18:58:
And I guess money is just moving so much faster now on Lightning that I start to think about how it changes the way that people behave. And I wonder if being able to get access to or being able to see all the money flowing in and out of your accounts of your wallets, if that changes how people might act. Like today I pay my rent the beginning of the month. Most people have a paycheck that comes in every two weeks. They have grocery bills every week, and they kind of try and net it out at the end of the month to get more money coming in than they left out. But now on Lightning, you may be able to see the stuff in real time. Isn't that kind of crazy that there's going to be or there could be some maybe it's through a single wallet, maybe it's through Strike where I can see and monitor the flow of money going in and out of my account at any given moment. And I can just instantly know, am I net positive or net negative in any given moment. I think that's wild.
Sam Walker - 00:20:12:
Yeah. And Jack Mallers has talked about the idea of streaming somebody their paycheck, right? You think about not waiting those two weeks to get your paycheck, but the hour I just worked, I just got paid for. Right. And to me, that just brings a lot more honesty on both sides of the equation for money, right, those receiving it, and also when you're paying that money that's instant, that's final. And you're not as encouraged to have credit card debt. What is equivalent to credit card debt because you saw it and then you saw it leave and how yeah. Seems like that could really change somebody's behavior and I'm hoping make them more honest with themselves and kind of disincentivize a lot of the crazy debt that so many people go into as they're paying for things.
Kevin Rooke - 00:21:33:
Now in this streaming world where there's a bunch of different services on the internet that you can send and receive money from, do you think that initially this is going to happen denominated in Bitcoin or is this going to be happening over Lightning? But denominated in dollars similar to how, like a Strike remittance might work.
Sam Walker - 00:21:58:
I think it's going to be the latter because you think about these commercial relationships that people have, they need to be stable enough that you can rely on whatever you're charging to be relatively the same value from one day to the next or one week to the next. And with how hard bitcoin crashes and how crazy the runs up are, it would be hard to do any planning, especially on the business side. Or you'd have to have this interesting and complicated repricing game where you're saying, okay, today it's this many sats or this much bitcoin per minute, you want to watch something, or if it's the other way, this advertisement, you're going to get this many satoshis and then tomorrow that's going to go up or down. I think as humans, we need to be able to rely on things more than that. But I think before long it should flip, right? Once the volatility is kind of gone, then who knows, maybe the dollars volatility will be higher than bitcoins and it'll actually be the opposite problem, right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:23:59:
Yeah. So you think volatility right now is the primary constraint on people wanting to exchange in dollars? Or do you think the concerns around capital gains tax are also important? What are your thoughts on the biggest constraint today?
Sam Walker - 00:24:18:
I think both of those, right. And strike specifically kind of takes the capital gains part of it out of the equation because you're just, you're converting in realtime from or to fiat and you're not having to have the burden of tracking or paying those capital gains. I think a lot of it just comes down to the evolution of bitcoin and what it means and what a satoshi is or what a bitcoin is. I think too many people still have a hard time not seeing a bitcoin as the equivalent of a digital dollar and it just costs so much. Until we can start speaking fluently with satoshi's and yet, really, once we get to talking in Satoshi's all the time, I think that's where it can flip. But right now, people are like, okay, 40,000, or I guess it's 37 something today. That's just too much. Buying a loaf of bread or paying for some streaming service with something that costs that much, I think people are going to have to mentally make that shift.
Kevin Rooke - 00:26:07:
I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I just want to give a quick shout out to our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard for Lightning Network Infrastructure, creating layer two applications and services on top of bitcoin starts with Voltage, where you can spin up nodes, get access to liquidity, optimize your node, and much more. Voltage is leading the way as the next generation provider of Lightning Network Infrastructure. And if you want to get a free trial and start using Voltage today, you can do so at voltage.cloud. I want to talk about Web3, because some of the conversation we're having now is related to it, right. It's very clear right now that the internet's evolving, and so much of the core of that evolution is like payments and money. And there's different ways of expressing that. We see in the crypto space. The ideas are, well, all it's all going to be NFTs, or it's all going to be tokens, or it's all going to be these new things in the bitcoin space. It seems to be like it's all going to be payments, and it's all going to be like you're going to be able to stream money, you're going to be able to send sats, receive sats, and it's all going to be like fluid and mobile. First, can you describe your vision for what you think? Maybe Web3? If you don't like that term, that's fine. But what is the next iteration of the internet look like to you?
Sam Walker - 00:27:40:
The term Web3 just really irks me because it means a million different things and nothing all at the same time. And I compare it to pre 2000, the internet domain names.com. You have a diaper delivery service and you put a .com on the end of it. Then suddenly it's supposed to be worth so much more. And I think so many solutions are being shoehorned into this idea of decentralization and the blockchain. And I think just like the big.com bust, it's going to be a bloodbath of people who invested in these things, and they're just going to be holding the bag and wondering why they bought stock in diapers.com, the equivalent of it in the Web3 world. But my thesis is that there really should only be one money in this new digital world that we're heading to. And to me, it's clearly bitcoin. And I think there are a lot of use cases and benefits that we can get from removing these central parties from a lot of these transactions, whether it be home titles or remittances and all these other all these other reasons why we have have to pay all this extra to have somebody who's going to screw it up in the middle of the transaction. And I don't think in general we're going about it in the right way. With all these Web3 projects, I think it makes more sense to help to build on top of Bitcoin solutions that will enable these types of transactions and still take the middleman who's doing the rake out of the middle and give more benefit to both sides of the transaction.
Kevin Rooke - 00:30:41:
Yeah. When you think about internet transactions today, I guess, or the ways in which people use the internet today, who do you think is going to be, which applications are going to be the most disrupted? Which ones are going to have to deal with this introduction of Bitcoin and kind of really face the fact that their business model may not work in the next ten years?
Sam Walker - 00:31:14:
I think there are some obvious ones and some less obvious ones. I think the obvious ones are the Visa’s and the Chase’s of the world. It may have even been on your Twitter feed, I saw that Visa is is raising their transaction fees or basically all the cards are. So, you know, essentially the the bare minimum that you're paying is like 60 plus cents for any transaction. Right. And it seems like the wrong direction to go, especially after the announcement at the Bitcoin conference where Strike is going to embed Lightning in all these point of sale systems. Like thinking about raising the price with that traditional model that taking so much already from everyone and hasn't improved. Like we've gone from swiping a card to tapping the terminal or putting the chip in. Like that's really the advancement that they've made and they think they can charge more. So I think anyone that currently charges a fee for a transaction that is purely transactional, that is just the flow of money, they better pivot pretty hard, in my opinion. But I think you think of the evolution of media and how the studios really controlled so much of the value and the money associated with the entertainment industry and these television stations that basically had a chokehold on everyone. Now we've moved to YouTube where these creators it doesn't matter if you're some Joe Schmo in your basement, if you have something interesting to say, you can make some money doing that. Right, but we still have Google and YouTube in the middle of that transaction. And like you said, it's 55% that they're sending their way to Joe. But why did they deserve 45%? And you're saying that that's the more that looks like the best
Kevin Rooke - 00:34:19:
That's the most generous
Sam Walker - 00:34:20:
The most generous yeah. Situation that you can have. But what if it was 99% going to those who actually deliver the value? And to me that's kind of the direction whether you're podcasting, I think we're moving in that direction already and I think it's going to become the norm instead of the exception in the not too distant future. And really if Bitcoin succeeds, I just see that value gravitating to the individuals that are contributing instead of the ones who have the right relationships right now or the right trademarks that have a chokehold on whatever industry or relationship.
Kevin Rooke - 00:35:32:
Now let's use your media example because this gets me thinking about what the future looks like. So in the media example, we've had a long history of companies that have had chokeholds on either a specific region or a specific market. You go all the way back to newspapers, then you go to TV stations. It always kind of centralizes down to a few or for newspapers within the city, there's typically only one or two dominant newspapers and then you have TV stations again, like through the 60s and 70s it was ABC, NBC, like just a handful of stations. Then it kind of spreads out a bit and then we get YouTube, YouTube and Facebook and Google or Google and YouTube together and all of a sudden it's back to two or three with a strong chokehold on media. Do you think that in this next era where we can kind of like democratize access to payments, we can kind of like open things up? Is there going to be someone else that that is able to take a chokehold on the internet? Like, I imagine there's going to be some way for someone to capture an enormous amount of value, but I don't know what that looks like and I don't know if Lightning solves that specific problem. So do you think that we get to a point where companies are forced to compete on the merits of their product more so than their kind of locked in network effect? Would love to hear your thoughts on that.
Sam Walker - 00:37:10:
Yes, there's a bit to unpack there. I do think that to me, what Bitcoin from a very high level does it makes it makes money more honest, right? And I think it will enable the individual to receive more value for their contributions just because of that honesty and transparency that you can't really avoid if things go the way that I hope they do. And I do think that it's going to come down to those organizations who are able to deliver the most value. I think it will weaken those who are purely reliant on their legacy network effects and the chokeholds that they have on different markets, because there will be less both regulatory and I think there will be less regulatory hurdles to go over. And there will also just be this ability to send and receive value in a straightforward way that there never has been before.
Kevin Rooke - 00:39:24:
So anyone depending on closed source money and regulatory capture, like anyone depending on that as a business model is now going to be kind of screwed and all of a sudden they have to build something that people want and get people on their platform and to stay on their platform with the merits of their product. But it's hard for me to believe that there's not going to be a network effect that takes over and replaces that one. Maybe it's not a network effect or like a lock in around money, because now if Bitcoin succeeds and Lightning succeeds, we've effectively opened money to anyone. Anyone can kind of plug in into this network. But I imagine there's going to be another network effect or another lock in that manages to find a way to lock people in. Do you have a sense for what that might be? I know there have been so many of these instances throughout history where someone has been able to gather a critical mass of people, lock them in, and it's time and time again, it happens in different ways. And so I guess I'm just wondering what that next way will be.
Sam Walker - 00:40:40:
Right? And I remember at the Bitcoin Conference, I forget who the speaker was, but he said, I hope that we're not assuming that Bitcoin will do every good thing that we hope it does and that it won't do anything that we hope it doesn't do. Right. And it's a good question, and I think whatever that is, I think it will be forced to be more honest than players in the past that have gotten these unfair advantages when it comes to market capture. And I think it's going to be easier to vote for the other guy with your dollars than it has been in the past. But I think that's a great question, and I don't know who that is or what that would be, but I'm looking forward to a lot of things changing, especially when somebody is a known bad player, but they're still succeeding in very big ways. I think that type of world, hopefully that type of thing will be less common in the world in the future. And at the very least, hopefully it'll make those big players need to get their act together instead of leaning on those captured markets that they already have.
Kevin Rooke - 00:42:49:
Yeah, it's just one more. They can no longer depend on this crutch or this like they have to stand for themselves and kind of like solve problems on their own to keep their relevance or dominance or whatever we want to say. Yeah, okay. I want to transition a Bit to Web, to social platforms, and I guess email. Let's incorporate email into this as well. Do you think? Gmail and Hotmail and Facebook and Twitter. I mean, Twitter already has to some extent, but do you think it makes sense for some of these businesses to integrate Lightning? Like, if you were in charge of maybe this is a good way to phrase it, if you were in charge of Twitter today, what's your strategy? Are you building out deeper integrations with Lightning? How are you. Going to do it? Is it going to be a pay to get to my inbox? What are some of those approaches? What might some of those approaches look like?
Sam Walker - 00:43:51:
Yeah, and obviously with this whole conversation happening on Twitter at such an interesting time, with the Elon Musk situation and kind of this possibility for improvement, where Twitter really hasn't improved that much recently at all. And I think Lightning could be interesting in a lot of different aspects of Twitter. Obviously, we already talked about the advertisement side of the equation. If you could attribute these different aspects to your profile or even prove them, then you could allow yourself to be targeted by advertisers and benefit from that as a Twitter user. But as far as the spam bots, obviously you could kind of create that pay wall for somebody to be able to comment, they would have to pay some sort of amount on Lightning. Even if that's a few satoshi's, I think it could weed out so many of those bots. And if there was a way for someone to get penalized, so if you had to put some sats in somewhere in order to use Twitter, and if you were a bad actor and people were flagging you, then you could lose some of that value that you have. Right. That should be interesting, just being able to comment on certain people's posts. So you think about the more influence somebody has, the more spammy posts you're going to get, especially right out of the gate. Right. And you get a lot of these impersonators that I'm sure trick plenty of people, and you could weed those out pretty easily by charging a penny or something like that for them to be able to do a comment. And then obviously there's the DM side of the equation where you could implement a solution like Reacher, where either you already had a loaded up account or you want to send Kevin Rooke a message. It's going to be fifty cents. And Twitter takes some of that, but hopefully gives most of it to you if you're going to get that message. And you could have different levels of payment if you responded to the DM. That's something that some people have given me feedback on Reacher. They don't want to pay unless the person actually reads their email or responds to it. And obviously there's some difficulty with that because these Lightning payments are instantaneous and it's already settled and there's not a good way that I can think of to kind of stage that in a way where you could easily refund the user if they didn't get a response in a certain amount of time or something.
Kevin Rooke - 00:48:09:
Right. Those all make sense. And as you were describing some of the ways Twitter could integrate payments, it made me realize a lot of these are not cannibalizing their existing revenue. A lot of those things you mentioned are just their additions. They're like Twitter can operate as a business, it can have advertisers, it can still earn revenue. It doesn't have to go like, we're going to completely axe revenue and we're going to go after this Lightning strategy. Like these two can happen in tandem. So it makes me think that maybe it is possible for some of the web two players to start experimenting on Lightning, integrating it some way to their services. And if it picks up and it takes off and they can recognize there's a growth curve here, maybe then it makes sense to either integrate it with their advertising business or change their advertising business. But I think that's one of the cool things about Lightning specifically on podcasting, I found this to be really cool, is that I can now have this relationship, a direct relationship with the audience. They can send in comments and questions and stats and it doesn't change the experience for anyone who is not onboarded to Lightning. Like if I've never heard of Bitcoin before and I want to listen to a podcast for me, I can use Spotify, I can use Apple, it doesn't change my experience. So I think that's a really cool thing that Lightning can kind of pick up steam and get adopted without having someone to really entirely change their business model.
Sam Walker - 00:49:54:
Yeah. And it really just could open up so many different I think they will seem obvious in the future ways to leverage these really small payments. But one thing that you talk about web two and you talk about Gmail and you got Microsoft 365, what if they charged whoever's sending an email a very small amount for that email to even get through to the other side? Then they're not spending all their time trying to fight off these bots and these spammers. They're just focusing on making that experience better and delivering more value to the consumer so they want to use their service. Reacher, in a sense, could be part of the addition to the protocol level of email, where I'm sending an email to a server, that server could say, this is how much it's going to cost to get through, otherwise don't bother.
Kevin Rooke - 00:51:37:
Yes. So it could almost be like a default setting in all email providers to really cut down on spam right away.
Sam Walker - 00:51:47:
Yeah. Because one of the frustrations I think of this Reacher concept is until it's popular enough that you know that that Reacher me means you're going to have to pay somebody's sending that email and they're getting an email back saying, hey, here's the work that you did. Do you want to pay for it? Or I guess you've wasted your time. Right. And it's a little bit of a bait and switch, but you could integrate that into email clients if there was part of the protocol. I want to send an email to this email address. How much is that going to cost me when I'm putting in the two line then I would know whether or not it was worth writing that email in the first place.
Kevin Rooke - 00:52:46:
One thing that makes me think of is the necessary tooling to make this easy for an end user. If the internet is all of a sudden going to be full of paywalls and you have to send money to receive this and you have to send fifty cents to send an email, you have to send like two cent to upvote something on Stacker News. If you want to send tips to a podcast or you got to send a couple of stats. It strikes me that there's going to be some requirement for like a simple way for, for people to interact with all these apps and probably not on a one by one basis.
Sam Walker - 00:53:22:
Yeah.
Kevin Rooke - 00:53:22:
What are your thoughts on like the evolution of wallets and the ways in which an end user might interact with a variety of Lightning enabled apps in the future?
Sam Walker - 00:53:35:
Yeah, that's an interesting question. And I think talking about this idea that I'm going to be browsing around and there are all these services or sites where I'm expected to pay a little bit to read an article or to stream a podcast. To me, that browser wallet integration, I think, is going to have to evolve quite a bit. And with that, the security of it all is also going to have to evolve the wallet experience in general. People are going to need to understand a lot better than they do right now what that wallet means and what it represents. Because a lot of people just think of it like, I have a bank account, but really no, you have a bank in your browser. Right. And how easy it is for somebody to trick somebody to pay them in one of these currencies and how impossible it is to get that back once you do. Right. So I think a lot of that education is going to have to happen along with the evolution of the technology. And I think one thing that definitely needs to be solved, and I know it's in the works, is this idea of subscriptions through Bitcoin, right? If I'm paying per day or per hour or per month, I don't want to have to be bothered every time I'm reading an article necessarily. Especially if I'm going there every day and reading a few articles. I'm going to get at the very least bugged by having to pay three times. But if my guess is there will be a way to plug into the website where you just push a button and it authorizes in a really easy way, the payment, without you really having to say, okay, now there's a Lightning payment I need to make. Let me go find my favorite Lightning wallet and scan the screen or something like that.
Kevin Rooke - 00:56:44:
Yeah, I think that a lot of people, when they hear, if people start to think about the next version of the internet being a place where there's paywalls everywhere and that you're going to have to keep entering in payment details. I think to a lot of people, instinctively, that sounds like a nightmare because of the friction associated with making a credit card payment online. It's like you got to enter whatever, 16 numbers, you got to enter a bunch of different codes, got to flip your card over, check your three digit code on the back, and you got to do that every time. And every site has a different layout. It's a nightmare when you do it in a fiat world. But I guess one thing Lightning can do here is it really takes the burden of making a payment and it can drop that cost by like 10x or 100x, and it can just really make it as simple as maybe it's a one time budget setting every month where you set a budget for these different apps you use. Maybe it's a single scan of QR code. I think that is what makes me optimistic about the possibility of a paywalled Internet on Lightning is that now it may be that we use paywalls more frequently, but the cost of using a paywall is going to go down so dramatically that it's almost going to appear frictionless, even though, you know, there is actually, in fact, a payment happening.
Sam Walker - 00:58:16:
Definitely. And have you ever heard of the service privacy.com?
Kevin Rooke - 00:58:23:
No, I haven't.
Sam Walker - 00:58:23:
So essentially it's a way to spin up a digital credit card that is specific to a merchant and you can put limits on it in whatever way you want. I'm not sponsored by Privacy, so you can say this is the limit per year, per month, per week or total, and kind of put it on the website knowing if their database gets hacked, nobody can do anything with that card. And it also puts the control of those payments back on the user. So I can toggle even after I've supplied that credit card, I can turn it off, I can reduce the limits, I can do those sorts of things. And I think that type of thing will become more native to the payment experience in the future. And essentially there will people will again have to be more honest with themselves about where their money is going and they will be essentially forced to ask themselves if it's continuing to be worth it. And I think on the other side of that, companies will have to worry more about providing that continual value instead of just getting that credit card number one time. Right.
Kevin Rooke - 01:00:05:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I have a question about the impact of Lightning on the online world and the offline world, because you're kind of at this intersection here where you're seeing two different ways in which Lightning can impact the world. On the one hand, we have the traditional kind of like strike remittances where it's disrupting what was largely an offline process of remittances. It just looks like a slow process that was not internet native. And then on the other hand, now with Reacher, this is like an internet native solution with Lightning at the core. How do you think about the impact that Lightning is going to have on the offline payments versus online payments? Which one will be more impactful, in your view?
Sam Walker - 01:00:58:
So I think that's a good question. I would say it potentially has the possibility of improving the offline experience more because I don't know if you've tried to check out at a McDonald's by using one of their kiosks or even their app is pretty bad. But if that payment process became a lot more, had a lot less friction, then I think it opens up some interesting possibilities for kind of the more physical scenario, whether it's buying a soda at one of the soda trucks or checking out at McDonald's. But I think the internet native stuff, I think, can just be improved so much by the introduction of Lightning to that flow. I think there are so many use cases that have been limited by the the $0.30 plus or 2.9% plus $0.30 in the past that, you know, we're tearing that down and the types of experiences that we can enable are really interesting. So I have a hard time believing that the inperson physical scenario or flows will be will benefit more from this. But I could be surprised too.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:24:
Fair enough. Okay, I got one more question for you. You've integrated the Strike API into this product, right. Can you explain for maybe developers listening or people considering building their own Lightning app, the importance of this API and why this was necessary to accomplish what you're building at Reacher?
Sam Walker - 01:03:45:
Yeah. So Lightning by itself is not too terribly complicated to integrate into an app. Right. I feel like the big innovation at Strike is this ability to instantly convert from and to the fiat currency and have all the liquidity and all the hard stuff about managing Lightning already taken care of by Strike and giving that experience of allowing somebody to make a Lightning payment in an app, just be showing a QR code. And then all the magic happens underneath the covers and it just shows up as dollars in the account. Especially in the case of businesses, right? Like managing bitcoin and Lightning payments and all the implications of when that payment got received and the difference between then, the difference in price between then and when it was converted to dollars, whether it's sold on an exchange or what have you, or tracking the value and the basis over time is just a giant headache, at least in the United States. I think that's the big thing that it enables and Reacher is not keeping track of, at least at this point. It doesn't give you financial reports or anything if you've received so much in payments over time. But I would say that's why I would use it. And that's really what gave me the ability to it took me a little bit of time, but it would have taken me so much longer if I had to manage the Lightning aspect of what I'm doing by myself. Right, right.
Kevin Rooke - 01:06:38:
And then that conversion into dollars for those who want to receive dollars.
Sam Walker - 01:06:43:
I wanted to make sure something was clear and if people are still listening at this point. So Reacher, to me, is just a project to help illustrate how somebody could use the Strike API and kind of enable some of these. Just really give me a solution to a problem that I've had for a long time. And I'm sure Jack Muller's has a problem a thousand times as bad as mine with email and provide a solution to a problem. I'm not really treating this like a business, but I am treating it like kind of like an open source almost like an open source business where I want to help the community decide the direction of where it goes. And I people can contribute to the GitHub repo and it can evolve in a really interesting way that not a lot of public products like this have in the past.
Kevin Rooke - 01:08:17:
Yeah, well, I think the project is really cool for anyone listening that wants to learn more about it. Where can they go?
Sam Walker - 01:08:24:
So reacher.me is where I would start. You can get a hold of me. My Twitter handles @bluesam, so feel free to hit me up. And there's also a Reacher Twitter account, so we'll be watching that as well @reacher_me. Unfortunately, a guy calling himself Jack Reacher has the Reacher handle right now. Yeah. Any of those channels.
Kevin Rooke - 01:09:06:
Awesome. Thanks so much for taking the time. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I can't wait to give Reacher a try.