Evan Kaloudis - 00:00:00:
You know, I'm super bullish on the Lightning Network, but we need to be realistic about where we are. We have a ton of work to do. Lightning Network, where really shines is in meat space in the real world, face to face. Because if I'm just buying something online for like a like a purchase that's going to be mailed to me, like, I don't need that near instant confirmation. Some people need to touch the fire. Some people will need to touch the stove to realize that it's hot. But there are other wise people that take other people's horror stories to heart. And they're like, okay, I'm not going to do custody. I'm not going to do AML KYC. I'm not going to do shitcoin. I'm not going to lie. Funding an open source project is immensely difficult. We have a really clear sort of roadmap as to how we would enable Tyro and Tyro assets within Zeus. Fiat and Bitcoin payments are sort of at odds with each other. But on the other hand, on the other side of things, it's really a clever construction and can ultimately mean a whole lot for Bitcoin adoption.
Kevin Rooke - 00:01:10:
Evan Kaloudis is the founder of Zeus, an open source and self custodial mobile Lightning wallet. In our conversation, we discussed how Evan has built Zeus some of the new features it offers the tension between self custodial and custodial Lightning wallets. And then we got into the roadmap and business model of Zeus. Looking forward, Evan has also been added to today's show, splits. So if you enjoy this show and if you learn something new, the best way you can show your support is by sending in stats over the Lightning Network. You can use any Podcasting 2.0 app. There are dozens of them, but my favorite to use is Fountain. Before we get into today's show, just a quick message from our sponsors. Today's show is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the premier provider of Bitcoin and Lightning node infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Stakwork. And Stakwork is a Lightning powered transcription tool that takes the best of AIs and humans to create better, faster, and less expensive transcripts. We'll have more from Voltage and Stakwork later in the show. Evan, thank you for taking the time to chat about all your building today at Zeus. Why don't we start off with giving listeners a background of your time in Bitcoin? Maybe can you give people an understanding of how you first discovered Bitcoin and why you decided that this would be something you want to work on?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:02:37:
Sounds good. Kevin, thanks for having me on the program. Excited to talk with you today. So, getting into Bitcoin, I was studying computer science in undergrad in New York, and I probably heard about it first on Hacker news or like a slash dot. And I just always sort of at least those first few years I was writing it off, I'm like digital gold. I feel like we've gone through so many iterations of this between Bit Gold, like RuneScape gold. It really didn't resonate with me until a later date. So probably my junior senior year of Bitcoin when I took a dive into it, downloaded the software and started using it. It didn't really click for me until I went through and I had made my first transaction, sending and receiving, and then realized that I could take this wallet and as long as I have this information, the seed and I could go restore it anywhere else on a different computer or different device. It wasn't until then that I had that AHA moment and was like, okay, yeah, this is something else. This is legit, this is the future. And it's quite funny because I had been programming computers since I was like 13 or 14, I was studying computer science, and I also very uniquely had some exposure to Austrian Economics through my family friend, my uncle. And yeah, it's funny, like, how you can have all of this specialty knowledge in all of these areas that Bitcoin touches, but it still can take years and years for it to click. And I think for most people, they need to have that hands on experience, that AHA moment of the sending, the receiving, and probably most importantly, that recovery, taking that wallet and restoring it somewhere completely different.
Kevin Rooke - 00:05:01:
Right. Now, when you first had this AHA moment, were you thinking of Bitcoin as a tool to store value or to send payments?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:05:15:
I think it was a bit of both. I think you have like, that AHA moment when you go through the process of the transfer and you get that first confirmation, your GUI. But beyond that, I think coming to terms with it being the store value takes a little more time. There's so much that's obfuscated away with how money works today, right? Have you ever tried to talk to a group of friends that are not into Bitcoin or CS or any of this stuff? It's crazy, the misconceptions they have about the dollar. They're like, all right, it's backed by gold. It's all in Fort Knox, right? And you're like, no, that's not the case, and hasn't been the case in a long time. And it's really just this needless complexity that pushes people from understanding the real under workings or what the real power dynamics at play are. And it's funny when you see those dynamics play out and say, like alternate cryptocurrencies where people try to add complexity to schemes to just either try to sound smart, sound complicated, but mostly just to put normal people off from knowing the real dynamics that are important.
Kevin Rooke - 00:06:43:
So now you had this AHA moment. When did you then decide, okay, when did you go from like, Bitcoin is a cool idea, to I want to build Zeus?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:06:54:
Oh, man, that wasn't for years. Later, I went through the rest of my college career and went down all sorts of rabbit holes, especially with shitcoins. So I was trading. I set up a GPU mining rig that I set up in my dorm room. That was really fun. Good thing I had a girlfriend at the time because that thing was, like, loud as a jet engine, at least while I was mining. Like, the noisy algorithms eventually switched over to some stuff that was quieter. I'm like, make a little less money, but I always like to sleep here. So that was fun. Got involved a little bit with the dogecoin community and helped coat up just tiny bit of this multi Doge wallet that was like an electrom X fork. That was fun. And yeah, I guess in, like, the years that followed, the next year or two, I started realizing, okay, most of the stuff that I'm trading on here, I'm just trading for speculation, make a quick buck. I know it's a pump and dump, but then there were other projects, right, that I'm like, okay, this thing has some utility. I was someone who was super interested by privacy, especially after the Snowden revelations. I'm like, okay, Internet privacy is very important. Something like a Zcash or Monero, et cetera. I could see great utility in having that full opaqueness of the blockchain and not have to worry about chain analysis. Then eventually I realized that was mostly crap Zcash to a greater extent than Monero. But yeah, pretty much transitioned to Bitcoin only at that point. And yeah, after school I went to Cybersecurity. I wore a lot of different hats at this cybersecurity startup. Crazy and amazing experience. I worked on front end for an interface that lets you triage threats, see alerts on your network. I did about a year of working on the cloud back end interface for our threat intelligence sharing between our different customers, and I also did a year of being an analyst. So I was like, okay, help build the product. Now I get to use it out in the field. And I was helping banks and different institutions triage their alerts on their system and either find out that it's a false positive or go find something nasty that needs some action to be taken on. So that was fun. So somewhere in the middle there, probably my fourth year there, I was like, okay, Bitcoin is awesome. I'd gone through the fork wars and seen arguments on both sides and had known about Lightning but hadn't gotten my hands dirty. And I'm like, okay, I ran a Bitcoin node before I signaled for segment 2X. Let me take it up another level. Let me use this and see what this Lightning thing is all about. So I ultimately got a Raspberry Pi. I think I had one from university too. They'd given me, like, the first gen one. Total piece of crap. I had to get, like, a newer board. I got it set up. I set it up with the Raspberry Pi Bolt. raspibolt.org staticus. Set that up I believe so. That's like a very hands on guide, assuming you know a little bit about Linux. But here's all the commands you got to set up and how to set up the services. So I set that one up first and started toying around with Lightning and made a lot of mistakes there, right? Like I had a spinning disk hard drive instead of a solid state, which is like pretty much the biggest mistake you can make. Trying to run the Lightning though your blockchain gets out of sync, it's hard to recover if they crash often. Yeah, just a big mistake there. But yeah, I eventually went through the ringer a few times, like redid the note a few times, updated the hardware. I did Rest Pi Blitz which is like a more of a self contained thing, just like burn in ISO and I'm like, okay, this is great, I'm making transactions, I'm getting stickers from Blockstream, I'm doing this stuff. But there's all these other components to the in node. It's like number one. It's like if you're an operator and you're managing these channels, you might want to take a look at what the state of those channels are. You might want to change the fees on them, you might want to open up new channels. And I wanted to be able to do that on the go and say, okay, I'm going on the bus into work every day for my cyber job. I want to be able to take a look at how all that stuff is looking and modify them as I go. And the other part of it is like Lightning Network where it really shines is in meat space in the real world, face to face. Because if I'm just buying something online for a purchase that's going to be mailed to me, I don't need that near instant confirmation. I could just broadcast on chain it'll, settle, get my goods. That's not the main place it's going to shine. So I'm like, okay, let me get a kick start on this. Let's start building this mobile app. So I had this previous experience building out this interface at my cybersecurity job. We had built it with React. I had heard about React Native and thought it was a pretty good foray into mobile app development and just was off to the races there. Loaded up my computer with a bunch of podcasts from a lot of shows I was listening to at the time from TFTC, Rabbit Hole, Recap, Stephan Livera and noted and yeah, just started slowly building this thing out for myself. I guess I forgot an important part of the story though. Prior to starting Zeus, I was actually putting in a couple of contributions to the Zap project. So Zap is the first project that got started up by the guys who made Strike. So Jack Mallers was working on this and at first it was just a desktop application, which seems like it's still running pretty good, but it's got like a Neutrino node in there and you sync it up and you can start making your first Lightning transactions. But just about at the time as I was starting to contribute, they had just kicked off their mobile applications. Like iOS was out the door. Right. And I actually pitched it to Jack. I'm like, hey Jack, I want to build an Android version of Zap using React Native. And he's like, oh, that would be really cool. However, someone's already started it and we just prefer to do it like all native code just in Java. And I'm like, okay, that's cool. So from there, knowing that I couldn't do Android version of Zap, I'm like, I'm going to just do my own app. I'm going to make it for iOS too, and just go off to the races. I knew I'd have a couple of advantages doing React Native, knowing that I could write the code once pretty much in most instances, and create two versions of the app. I just iterated on this thing for myself until I was at the point where I'm like, okay, number one, it would be nice if I got help. And number two, it's good enough that I could get other eyes on it. I'm not embarrassed to show that this is what I had put together and I know it needs work, but it's good enough to start for other people to start mucking around with, right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:15:07:
Yeah.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:15:08:
That's sort of the story of how Zeus got started up. My first free and open source project and running to this day we've got, I don't know, probably close to 10,000 users and 500 plus stars on GitHub, 30 plus contributors. It's been quite a journey.
Kevin Rooke - 00:15:26:
And so you highlighted at the beginning that one thing you wanted to be able to do was take your note on the go and be able to like play around with it on mobile. And I imagine you couldn't have done that before Zeus. What were some of the other things that you saw as missing in the Lightning ecosystem that compelled you to build Zeus?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:15:53:
Yeah, I mean, there just wasn't anything quite like it and the things that were like it were just all very rudimentary. So what I had seen as competitors to Zeus or something similar with similar functionality like those projects either didn't have enough steam to begin with or the creators were not as interested in maintaining them. Yeah, I thought mobile was just particularly lacking. I saw some efforts for some of the web interfaces we had like Ride The Lightning was really quite good and was coming up just a little bit before Zeus, I believe. Then we had ThunderHub later on and I thought this was a great experience I had was doing transactions a lot with that when I wasn't using CLI. But on mobile. I was waiting on Zap Android and I'm like, okay, I'm just going to do it my own way and use this as a learning experience to learn this new framework, even if this doesn't become a full fledged project that I'm working on.
Kevin Rooke - 00:17:02:
And now that you look at it, you look a few years into the future and now where we are today, you look at the Lightning landscape, what do you think is missing today? When you look at all the things we could add into the future and all the things that we need to get to the next level of adoption, what are some of those constraints or unmet needs today?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:17:28:
Oh man, I'm super bullish on the Lightning Network. But we need to be realistic about where we are. We have a ton of work to do. Not very many people are using Lightning right now, and that's okay, but we need to keep our heads down, keep working and ship a lot of stuff. So I think more than anything, there's a lot of stuff to be done in terms of User Experience and friendliness, especially for noncustodial users. Lightning works really good right now if you're trusting some mega node to hold your keys and you don't care about getting rugged like fire up Blue Wallet or Wallet of Satoshi or a KYC service, and 9999 times out of 10,000, that payment is going to go through really quickly and really well. But as far as doing it in a non custodial way where you hold your own keys, there's a lot of work we have to do there, I think, especially in terms of channels and liquidity and finding ways to take that weight off users, or at least help them have it auto managed to a certain extent before users are willing to say, hey, I got it from here. Let me get the sticks and I'll take control. We've been lucky to have a couple of great products in terms of wallets that do a lot of that for users already in wallets such as Breez and Phoenix, but there's a lot of trade offs with them. Sometimes the fees aren't abundantly made transparent to the users. There's a lot of frustrations with people's experiences there and I think there's room for a lot of improvement.
Kevin Rooke - 00:19:26:
Now, Zeus brands itself as an advanced app, and I'm curious to know what the reasoning there is. When you've gone this noncustodial route, what was the strategy? Why did you pick an advanced version rather than one that was kind of like designed for newcomers or people having their very first Lightning experiences?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:19:50:
That's a great question. So I think it's twofold. I think it's important to note that above everything, I made Zeus to scratch my own edge. It's like any features that I really work hard to put into Zeus, I'm doing it because I want to use it. And if other people will get value out of it, and I could share it with them and then they could improve their lives somewhat by using it. That's all just icing on the cake for me. So me, as a more advanced user, I wanted something that I could use that gives me the control, something that maybe the nerdiness level is on like a ten out of ten. But I also like the empowerment that gives people to have such granular controls, pretty much the whole kitchen sink in their pocket on their phone, and being able to do all of these crazy nuanced things without having to do the CLI commands. So that's part of it. But that all being said, we do have aspirations to go to the other side of the spectrum and just cater to the average user. Zeus said metaly is in my YaYa's first Lightning wallet, but I like to make her first Lightning wallet. I just think that by going and making the super cipher punk version of the Lightning wallet, it'll be easier to take those lessons, reconcile them and come out with something that's more user friendly than doing it the other way around. I really don't see someone like Bridge or Phoenix going ahead and making like, a fullfledged wallet on the other side of the spectrum.
Kevin Rooke - 00:21:34:
Yes. What would a beginner friendly noncustodial wallet look like to you? Like, would you be able to manage your channel balances and things like that? Or what kind of complexity that exists in Zeus's advanced product would not exist on the beginner friendly version.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:21:55:
Well, I really like the idea of having a user sort of level up. Right, so ultimately, while you want to keep things very abstract and simple for someone just getting into it, I really like the idea of, like, saying, okay, like, now the user gets it, now they're ready to take the whole step. Let's take the training wheels off in the same app. So maybe you start off and you're like, okay, here are your channels, or here's, you know, different, like, trenches of liquidity, like, depending on what your needs are. And perhaps like, you have an LSP that's paid instead of, you know, just banking on fees or mining users data or something. And you just make it very straightforward there and yeah, I think it's really just about trying to figure out how you decrease that time from installing the wallet to the time it takes to receive your first payment. And that's going to take, like, plugging in with an LSP that's going to require zero confirmation channels. I think that there's tons of room for improvement. You can do a lot of small stuff to make that experience better by applying training wheels in different areas. But I think ultimately we got to keep our eyes on the prize and realize what applications we're up against. We're not up against Zeus, isn't up against Phoenix or Breez or Wallet of Satoshi or any of those. What we want to build it. We want it to be going up against PayPal and sell Cash App Venmo. Those are the user experiences that we have to keep in mind. If we want to make noncustodial Bitcoin usage or just Bitcoin usage in itself, like something that the masters are going to use, we need to keep things in perspective.
Kevin Rooke - 00:23:58:
I agree. Now, the four kind of payment giants you just highlighted there all share one similarity and they are all custodial. So I now want to break into this Torny issue of custodial versus noncustodial in Llightning and I want to get your view to start on why you chose noncustodial over a custodial approach.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:24:26:
So I think self custody and ultimately personal responsibility is a central tenet to the Bitcoin ethos. And I think that if we make decisions in building up our ecosystem that strictly favor custody and putting on those training wheels for users at the expense of them not holding their own keys, right, we're going to just end up in a new version of the current financial system with just like bells and whistles put on it. If people can ultimately do stuff like fractional reserve banking, how much better is the Bitcoin standard ultimately? And I got to say that I'm also realistic, I know that the vast majority that people are going to be using Bitcoin, at least in the immediate future, is going to be heavily with a custody route. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't make these experience, these noncustodial experiences that are top of class. There's ways that we can make them and really highlight where we shine and where we thrive and the control we give to users and how we can empower them. But at the same time, it's going to take a lot of people to get burnt to come to the same realization of what the importance of this is. Like this cycle, the big story is FTX and their fraud. But the next cycle it could be like an instance of custodial Lightning users getting rugged and losing access to their funds, whether it be from legal pressures or from just fraud and theft from operators. And ultimately we can eradicate that threat entirely, at least not realistically in my eyes, but we can at least give people the alternative and show them and educate them and try to push things in the direction that we want to see things.
Kevin Rooke - 00:26:48:
Is there a way to get people to make that realization on their own without having a massive fraud or something blowing up in their face? Like, is there a way to get people to respect and appreciate this non custodial idea without first losing their money?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:27:10:
It's tricky because everyone's different, right? So some people need to touch the fire, some people need to touch the stove to realize that it's hot. But there are other wise people that take other people's horror stories to heart and they're like, okay, I'm not going to do custody I'm not going to do AML KYC. I'm not going to do shitcoins. XYZ those people are out there. They do take these stories to heart. There's just not as many as of them.
Kevin Rooke - 00:27:44:
And reminds me of a quote, I think it was from Warren Buffett. He's like, you have to learn from experience, but it doesn't always have to be your own experience. You can learn from everyone else's mistakes as well.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:27:57:
Yeah. So I think it's amazing when Bitcoiners can go ahead and put their ego to the side and admit to mistakes in the past. Like, I've made a ton in my Bitcoin career and trading shit coins getting rugged on some. Yeah. You just got to ultimately get over that and try to be comfortable with sharing your own experiences for the better of other people.
Kevin Rooke - 00:28:28:
Now, this weekend, actually, I guess it was last week, there was the African Bitcoin Conference and there was a bunch of news that came out about Strike and Bitnob and they're partnering up to enable transfers from US dollars into Africa and vice versa. And there was a lot of commentary about this idea and this debate of custodial noncustodial. Of course, Strike in bit not being both custodial platforms. I think there was someone, maybe from the block team, I can't remember who it was, but someone said something about like, this is a partnership being built out of need rather than desire. One that like, it's just going to be something that the idea was, that this is something that is going to be improving people's lives immediately and they kind of need it. And they're not as concerned maybe about whether or not it's custodial, that it's just a faster and improved version of what they have today. That's me kind of paraphrasing the quote. I don't even remember where it was from. And then there was another comment, I think it was from Alex Leishman at River. And he said that mobile noncustodial Lightning is an extremely difficult technical and financial engineering challenge at scale. He's kind of left at that. But there was a lot of discussion about this idea of, like, should it be custodial, should it be noncustodial? And so I want to get your take on what are some of those big challenges that you face on the non custodial side that a custodial provider might not face.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:30:05:
Sure. I guess number one is channel management and liquidity. There's a lot of people that they come and they download Zeus. They're well acquainted with how on chain Bitcoin works. They deposit from a different wallet into Zeus, onto the onchain account, so they have an on chain balance. But then they're like, Evan, what the hell is going on here? I can't make any Lightning payments. I'm generating invoices. No one can pay to me. So the whole concept of payment channels is foreign to them. So there's like this big educational process. Right. And then it's about the direction of that liquidity, right? It's like, oh, I opened a channel to you, Evan, but no one can send me payments. It's like, oh, it's got to be balanced. I'm limited by how much is on the other side of the channel. So that in itself is like a big learning curve, a challenge even for people who are well acquainted with Bitcoin. So you got that. But if you want to, like, rewind, like, even before getting into Lightning, like that product in Africa that the Strike team has put together with Bitnob, right? The recipients on the other side of that, they don't know that Bitcoin has been used at all or was even involved. And I think that's like, what a few people's problem with. It was like, oh, they don't even know they're using Lightning. Is this even a Lightning product? It seems like just this banking relationship between these two entities. To a certain extent, that's true. So there's a lot of people that are frustrated and seeing, okay, we're going to see all these banking alternative products instead of Lightning being adopted directly. And yeah, of course that's not the end goal. That's not great. You still have this third party risk where I guess Bitnob or Strike can rug you and that's not the end goal. Right? We want to get rid of those intermediary parties, but in the short term, we're talking about people who really get screwed over on a day to day basis by remittances. We're talking about a big pie that MoneyGram and Western Union are just like being really bad actors and taking more money away from your family that you're trying to send money to at a greater basis. If it's going to a poor nation, a lot of really bad actors in that space, you're going to get your pennies in a nod over the service. Getting started. It's just so silly to get upset about. But it's also important for us to have our eyes on the prize and know where we want to get to and know that this is like a cool step, but this is ultimately really far away from where we want our goal to be, right? It's like a trade off. A lot of people can benefit from it today, but how do you try to introduce them to Lightning or Bitcoin, even when it's all abstracted away? And I don't really have a good answer for you, at least for that product.
Kevin Rooke - 00:33:31:
Now, one thing I've heard from some people, I think maybe this was popularized by Alex Gladstein. I think he mentioned the idea that stable coins could be a stepping stone for people to get towards Bitcoin. And I wonder if the same could be said for wallets. Where do you believe that custodial wallets are a stepping stone towards noncustodial wallets? Or if you have any idea of where you're getting users from? Are these people who are previously using noncustodial Bitcoin solutions that were. Not Zeus? Or are they people graduating from Wallet of Satoshi to Zeus?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:34:14:
I think it's a mix of a few things. So there's definitely users that are graduating onto Zeus after going up a few wallets. It's less so going from Blue Wallet, Wallet of Satoshi to Zeus directly, but I see it in a couple of different groups. So you have Wallet of Satoshi and Blue wallet. Those are your custodial options. Then in the middle, you sort of have something like a Muun, which is self custodial, right? But you're not really using Lightning. You're using their Lightning nodes for submarine swapping. After that, it's Breez and Phoenix, in which you're running your own Lightning node on the device and then Zeus. So it's more likely that someone tries out Muun or either Breez or Phoenix before they come to Zeus instead of going directly from Wallet of Satoshi. But I think there's like a pretty clear progression there. But then I feel like there's a lot of users that sort of have that cheat code. And while they're not perfect these platforms, we see a lot of users coming from, say, our Raspberry Pi Blitz, our Umbrella’s, our Start9’s, these pre built node platforms, and they're like, hey, this is awesome. I got a Lightning node. How do I tap into it? How do I use this thing on the go? And Zeus are just like, naturally the number one answer for those people. And they're like, okay, this is cool. This is empowering. This is an awesome wallet, and it gives me access to do pretty much anything I need to do on this device.
Kevin Rooke - 00:35:59:
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Evan Kaloudis - 00:37:10:
Oh, I mean, certainly, at least today, from a sender's perspective, at the bare minimum, you have great privacy assurances using Lightning. Now, there's some complexities when you're dealing with the channels you opened up and how those are broadcast, but new ways to sort of circumvent those being tracked are coming up every day, including alias skids or short channel IDs that are typically broadcast to identify your channel. We're adding support for those at least with LND nodes in version 0.7. So pumped about that. But on the receiving side, generally, there's quite a bit more to do for Lightning. The issue is typically when you generate an invoice, it's got like your public key in it. It's like payer needs to know how to get there. Perhaps you have like route hints or whatever, but you're providing a final destination as to where it goes. So you could sort of say, okay, this is the node that I'm paying to. So we need something called blinded routes in which you can construct sort of blinded onion with the last part of those route hints as to get to your node are sort of concealed from the payer. So there's definitely a lot of stuff that needs to be done to get us that. Nothing's perfect, right? But I think with a couple of enhancements here and there, Lightning can be a highly private payment system.
Kevin Rooke - 00:38:47:
And do you expect that that's going to be a separation point between custodial and noncustodial over time, that these will diverge and become like custodial walls may require you to provide more and more information and noncustodial walls make it more and more private over time. Do you think those two diverge?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:39:07:
Yeah, absolutely. I think regulations are going to have a lot of these services, these custodial services to AML KYC, their customers get information about them, but also just because of regulations, just track even more data. Like if you make a payment on Law of Satoshi or Blue Wallet. So at least with the standard set up they have, they could track pretty much everything. I don't think Muun is that much better. And even nodes, I mean, wallets like Breez or Phoenix in which most users aren't opening up their own channels or they can't in the case of Phoenix, like that LSP, that single node you're operating through can ascertain a lot about you if you're super dependent on them. So that's why if I want to build out some LSP services with Zeus, I want to make sure that we carry over that. Open your own channel functionality and encourage it for users so that the LSP is not just some singular source of information that you can ascertain about users. But yeah, definitely that divide is going to just continue to grow over the years.
Kevin Rooke - 00:40:20:
Why haven't we seen much? It seems to me at least that we haven't seen much regulatory activity. People clamping down on Lightning providers or Lightning apps. Is it just too small today or why have we not seen any significant, at least compared to the regulatory crackdowns going on in Crypto, it seems like Lightning has kind of dodged most of the regulatory scrutiny to date.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:40:48:
I think you're pretty much on the money. Like Lightning is just too small right now. It's like silly analogy, but if you're a crook, right, if you're a mobster, right, in a lot of cases you're just hoping that they pinch all the bigger guys before they get to you, right? But at the same time, Lightning itself probably can't be regulated too heavily. Some of the services that are operating custodial probably will see more scrutiny. I think in a lot of cases they're just operating servers out of jurisdictions far outside of the United States's reach. So that helps. But I truly believe that once we see stuff like stable coins on Lightning in the form of Taro, the providers there and people operating on the edges are going to definitely be regulated. I don't think that's going to mean regulation for the whole of the Lightning Network. I just think that if you're going to be providing these currency switching services and helping people get routes to different services that are denominating their Lightning Payments and fiat, those parties are going to be regulated for sure.
Kevin Rooke - 00:42:05:
Will Taro have any impact on Zeus? Is that part of the product roadmap? What do you expect people to be able to do with it using their mobile phone?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:42:17:
So it's really interesting because with the addition of Lightning Node Connect, our new protocol for connecting to your LND node remotely, we have a really clear sort of roadmap as to how we would enable Taro and Taro assets within Zeus. It's something that there's definitely a lot of demand for. I think it's more so me exploring with it, getting more comfortable with it before we put it in and make that commitment to it. It's a really tricky thing to reconcile because fiat and Bitcoin payments are sort of at odds with each other. But on the other hand, on the other side of things, it's really a clever construction and can ultimately mean a whole lot for Bitcoin adoption. And I think we just need to figure out how we can minimize the downsides of it and just provide the best experiences for users and clear paths for them to accept Bitcoin.
Kevin Rooke - 00:43:30:
And do you expect fiat payments to be the biggest use case for Taro? Or there's ideas that there could be other shit coins listed, there could be intra company kind of private tokens. It allows for all sorts of assets. But I imagine if we take a look at the rest of the crypto landscape and see all the other assets that are available today, stable coins are a big driver already. Do you expect that to be true as well on Taro? Or are there any other types of assets that you think might see a lot of adoption on Bitcoin, even if they haven't in the crypto landscape?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:44:15:
So, number one, yes, definitely see stable coins as being the number one driver. It's pretty much the main purpose of this whole thing. Shit coins, they will exist because anyone could issue these assets on Bitcoin using tapout, whether they'll be popular, I think they're going to be way less popular than ship coins and other mediums on ERC, 20 blockchains and whatnot. Because just the ethos of Bitcoin, right? People that have been using Lightning and Bitcoin already are most likely going to tell you, okay, you don't want a shit coin. And a lot of the stuff you can expect to be issued on there is most likely going to be just garbage that just got issued. And since there's no real issuance mechanism, there's no proof of work for these assets, the mechanics are certainly less dynamic for you to do a shit coin on Taro other assets, you said like company shares or stuff like that, that will definitely become more popular. That could be a pretty cool way for a company to potentially raise by selling equity in the company. So that could potentially be very interesting. But I think it remains to be seen. Probably depends on what jurisdictions those companies are operating out of and what their risk tolerance looks like. And then lastly, I will say stuff like NFTs will likely not be popular on Taro, at least not on the Taro Lightning enabled side as these channels have to be specific to a single asset. And if you're minting a one of one NFT, putting it in a Taro Lightning channel is not going to make any sense.
Kevin Rooke - 00:46:07:
Right. Okay, that makes sense. Now I want to get into Zeus and the latest release. You guys work on a 0.7 release. Can you highlight for listeners some of the features? I think you already talked about a couple of them, but what are the new features that you guys are excited about introducing in this release?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:46:24:
Cool, let's do it. So I'd say the biggest things, let's try to narrow it to three. There's so much goodness in this release. Three features. Number one is Lightning Node Connect. Number two is our new home screen. So brand new view when you pop open that. And number three is BIP-21 unified QR codes. So let's just rattle off each one. So Lightning Node Connect. This is a killer, I would say, for people that have been struggling to connect their node to Zeus over the last year because of issues with Tor. So Tor has gotten super popular for users connecting to their devices at home. I'd say largely because of stuff like Zeus different wallets, like Wasabi, Samurai and the at home nodes like the Umbrella’s and the RaspiBlitz’s. People are just spinning up these nodes and pretty much every service on there has like a Tor hidden service. And since the use of these hidden services is increasing and the number of relays on Tor is sort of staying stagnant, that means there's much more demand than supply for accessing these services. And in a lot of cases, you're not going to be able to get the Tor. You're going to get a bad circuit. It's going to either be really slow or you're not going to be able to make a connection at all. So what we've done is implement this new protocol called Lightning Node Connect that the fine folks at Lightning Labs have set up. And you're able to essentially punch through your firewall your Nat at home, it could be locked in your closet, not exposed to the Internet other than connected to your modem. Right? And you can create a session that can be accessed from anywhere in the world as if the node is just on clear net in like a data center or on a virtual private server. And it just makes for a fantastic experience, TenX better experience than using Tor. So there's the caveat that you need to install a Lightning terminal on top of your instance of LND. So it doesn't work for like, see Lightning or Declare users, at least not currently. Those users might want to use some sort of home VPN service that they set up themselves, or maybe a commercial product like ZeroTier or Tailscale. If you want more info on those, come join us in the Zeus chat on Telegram. We got a bunch of people that will get you set up. So Lightning Node Connect is LND only, but we're super excited because the APIs that it exposes on top of Lightning Terminal mean that not only you have access to everything in LND, but you'll have access to the loop pool faraday, which is the counting system and eventually Taro calls. So it's quite possible in a future release, not only Zeus could potentially do stable coins on Taro, but you can get liquidity from something like Lightning Pool, which is a marketplace for selling channels. And you could also rebalance your channels using Lightning loop. So there's a lot of potential for a lot of really cool functionality that's going to make things on Lightning a whole lot easier for users.
Kevin Rooke - 00:49:58:
And then you had two other features you want to highlight the new update to the home screen. And then one that I'm really excited about is BIP-21 in Unified QR codes.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:50:08:
Absolutely. So what we did for new home screen, I'm not sure you can see it, is basically we got rid of the default view where you'll see the balances on Lightning on chain different accounts that's now on the secondary tab. So you could get to that still. But the point of this keypad is to be able to enter in an amount really quickly and either quickly receive to an invoice that you generate, or send out the door to Lightning address as quickly as possible. So it's two tiered, it's number one. You get more privacy by not flashing your balances when you open up the app, but also your sending and receiving flows are just two or three clicks fewer. So really pumped about that. And there's a good transition point into those BIP-21 unified invoices, because with this home screen, you could say, hey, I want to receive 5000 sats. You hit request and boom, you got a unified QR code. So the issue that unified QR codes are trying to address is the difference between on chain transactions and Lightning transactions. So on chain you get a Bitcoin address that is just the string that could be anywhere. You could push any amount of sats to it. And then on Lightning is an invoice that's one time, as opposed to on chain address that it could receive as many transactions as possible, and it's got a hard amount embedded in it. So instead of assuming that you need to present both of these options to a user, depending on what kind of wallet they have, whether they have Lightning enabled on their wallet yet or not, interestingly enough, we're also seeing wallets and different setups that only do Lightning, at least for some custodial setups. But anyway, the idea is you just present the user with this one QR code and the wallets are smart and they know which ones they could pay. So, yeah, instead of having tabs to fiddle with or have the user get confused about on chain or Lightning, depending on where they are in their Bitcoin journey, they should just be able to scan one QR code and their wallet does the rest. So like on chain wallet say, okay, I'm just going to pull out the on chain Lightning only let's say, yeah, I'm going to get the invoice out of there and pay that something like Zeus is a little more smart and says, hey, we found a unified QR code, what account do you want to pay it on? Your Lightning account, your on channel account? Maybe you want to in the future pay it from a hardware wallet that's hopefully for version 0.8. But then we'll also show the ability for someone to query Mempool space for their rates. So before even making this payment, you can say, hey, let's see what the Mempool looks like. What's it going to cost for me to get it there in, I don't know, depending on the situation on at the supermarket, what's the ten minute rate for an online payment? It doesn't matter as much. So you could pull it there, then when you're in Lightning, depending on the implementation, you could potentially pull the rates there too and make an informed decision on which way to pay based on your fee environment.
Kevin Rooke - 00:53:38:
That's very cool. And this is something I think there's at least a handful of companies that have adopted this. I know Cash App introduced it at Bitcoin 2022. I believe Bitnob has integrated unified QR codes as well. Why do you think other Lightning companies there's maybe, I don't know, three to four, maybe five that I've seen with unified QR codes, but there's a lot that don't have it still. Why do you think that is?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:54:08:
So for the companies that are adopting it. Right, so I think we saw Miles Suter from Cash App put a full thread about who's picking it up. I think number one thing, there is probably tons of help and support hours just trying to explain this difference to users and I think this is like quite a nice solution of trying to nip that in the bud. Obviously it's going to take most while it's coming on board and doing it, but I think they ultimately will. It's not a huge lift. It's going to take some engineering hours to iron out all the kinks and make sure everything's handled properly, both from the sending and receiving side. But it's going to happen. And I think the only reason that a lot of wallets haven't set up yet is A, they're trying to sort of suss it out, see what issues other people have. There's been a lot of concerns about all the QR codes are going to get too big, there's too much data in there. And also B is like the engineering hours and having different priorities. A lot of Bitcoin startups and wallets already spread pretty thin and others just don't have Lightning integrated at all, so we don't see anything from them at all. But.
Kevin Rooke - 00:55:31:
It strikes me as like an interesting feature for a lot of Lightning applications to integrate, especially the ones that require you to or want you to have a wallet balance. Because a lot of times things like Fountain, things like Stacker News, things like Mash, these are all well, they're somewhat social and so you could be paying or receiving sats for content you create, whatever. And it depends on a lot of people having money on the Lightning Network. And that's a big constraint because you got to teach people there's a Lightning wallet. I guess if you can abstract that away and say, hey, you want to start sending sats on Fountain? Well, just send money to this QR code in on Chain or Lightning. Doesn't even matter where it's coming from, just send these sats here now. It's in your custodial account. Now you can start playing around with it, graduate to non custodial, leave it in custodial, whatever your choice is. It's now on Lightning and you can move it back to on chain when you want.
Evan Kaloudis - 00:56:43:
Yeah, I think this just ties in a lot, decreasing that time to interact time. How do you minimize that time from user getting set up with a wallet to either sending or receiving their first payment? So I think that ties into that a whole lot. And if you don't have to explain or if you have to explain less differences between these parts of the Bitcoin stack in Lightning and on chain, you're going to get more and more adoption by just making these hurdles much shorter.
Kevin Rooke - 00:57:19:
Are there any particular features that you've integrated or strategies that you're using today to acquire new users for Zeus. What do you see as some of the low hanging fruit to pull on for increasing adoption of Zeus?
Evan Kaloudis - 00:57:42:
Good question. Well, it really depends on where things are. A lot of user demand. We're just trying to be the first in class in our category, which I think we can pretty safely say that we are right now. But yeah, I guess it depends on what needs arise. Like this last year, dealing with Tor has been a nightmare. So that just instantly made prioritizing Lightning node connect and similar alternatives like our number one priority. So it really depends on what people's needs are. But moving forward, I think we have like a really strong foundation. I think we're going to have to start experimenting with some more stuff, seeing what sort of stuff hasn't been done, but also going back to helping that adoption out. How do we lower that barrier to entry? So we're thinking a lot about our LSP and how we can monetize that, give people access to liquidity in a real top shelf way, but also in a very ethical way in which all the fees are spelled out in advance. We're not mining anyone's data and yeah, just other methods of just making it easier. Like, I don't want to only cater to people who have a node at home that they could connect to. We ultimately want to have a version of Zeus in which you have the node all in one package and you just have to grab it from our website or an app store and go off to the races with a full node in your pocket.
Kevin Rooke - 00:59:32:
Right. One thing you mentioned was the issues with Tor, and you mentioned earlier on about how there's this supply and demand imbalance and I don't know enough about it to make an educated comment on it, but I know that in Bitcoin we have this saying that Bitcoin fixes everything. Right. Bitcoin fixes this and aligns incentives. I wonder, is there a place for Bitcoin to help out here and align the kind of like, supply and demand mismatch that you're seeing on Tor? Either making it a paid service over Lightning, allowing these participants who are helping support the Tor network to earn money, is that something like it seems this has been an issue for months. I remember hearing it may have been in June. There was like a DDoS attack on Tor and it seems like it never really resolved. It's just perpetually an issue. But it's also a service that a lot of Bitcoiners love and a lot of people look at it and say, this is a great privacy preserving tool and I think a lot of Bitcoiners would be very unhappy if it no longer existed. And I wonder, I'm just kind of brainstorming off top of my head here, but is there a role for Bitcoin to play in supporting the Tor network?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:00:57:
Absolutely. I think this is a great question. We'll dive into it. So, first of all, it's good that Bitcoiners already understand the importance of privacy and of the Tor network. So it's been really encouraging seeing a lot of people set up different fundraises, encouraging other people to set up their own Tor exit nodes and relays to help sustain the network. So that's been great on its own, right? But ultimately you got to look at incentives, and the incentives there are really just people trying to preserve their own privacy, right, and to be altruistic. And I think there's a limit as to how far that can really go. So long term, it's not a sustainable way to just do fundraisers to run Tor nodes. So, yeah, I would absolutely love to see Tor or similar privacy preserving network to operate on a streaming basis with sets in which you're paying for every request you send off or get back. I think that would be amazing. I think there are a lot of challenges in doing that, namely in making sure that the data you're getting back is valid and not just some nonsense, some peers serving up trying to steal sats. So I don't know if we can find some sort of crafty way to verify those calls. Probably not because of how the web works. You might end up with some sort of incentive in a reputation system, but that's also very tricky. So, yeah, I mean, I definitely see the potential for it, and I'd love to see it. It's just that there's a lot of challenges in doing it, and I don't think it's just going to pop up overnight. I think it's going to take concerted effort. But now that we have this micro unit in the satoshi, or even if the mill is Satoshi, if you want to get crazy with it, we can have all sorts of new economic behavior that just wasn't possible previously. It doesn't make sense to sell anything less than a dollar in a lot of cases because of the credit card processing fees. A lot of establishments have their card minimums a lot higher than that because of their processing rates. And when that no longer becomes a problem, and as long as you have your inbound liquidity of the processing fees that really get paid by the payer, ln just invites so many different new use cases that you and I probably haven't even thought of yet, so super excited by those new economic opportunities and situations to arise. And it's just going to take a lot of experimentation, but I think that's like a great example of something we might see come to fruition.
Kevin Rooke - 01:04:06:
Do you have any examples off the top of your head of new economic behavior that you anticipate or hope that we'll see when Lightning payments become more mainstream?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:04:20:
So let's talk about something that has come to fruition, although not at a crazy huge scale. We do now have Podcasting 2.0 in which producers of podcasts can now receive Satoshis on a streaming basis at a minutely rate, at a rate at which the users choose, right? They call it value for value. If you get value from the program, you determine how much that value is to you and you give it to the producers voluntarily. And I think that that's amazing. It's really empowering. If you're on the other side of that, seeing the sat stream in and seeing your ideas validated in real time, it's really cool how it's split up. And you can give a producer or an executive producer on the show that's been helping out a certain cut of those sats coming in, receiving messages in through boost to grams, or these messages that come alongside your payments. It's super empowering and I think it's going to create for more honest and fair media because you're not like perverted by the incentives of maintaining advertisers or subscribers paying like a fixed fee. And yeah, there's definitely a lot of challenges with it, especially since it's a voluntary thing. But I think some of the content that we're seeing produce like this is quite beautiful. And we're going to see a lot more Bitcoin podcasters toss their ads to the wayside and as a result, be able to produce a better product where they're a more honest version of themselves, more true version of themselves. So that's going to be beautiful.
Kevin Rooke - 01:06:04:
Yeah. So you get to try it out on this show. Actually, I've been doing this so after the show I'll have to get your node pub key. But I've been doing this with every guest since maybe episode like 40 or 41, and I've had every guest get a share of the split and so sometimes they've chosen to donate it to the Human Rights Foundation or something, or take it themselves. It's really nice to see the messages come in and yeah, it's a very cool system for I think one place where it's really useful is in finding knowing when your podcast has potential to get product market fit because you don't have that signal. If you're starting on a podcast and you don't have a big presence online, it's very hard to get that signal. Because until now you've had to wait until you either get monetization on YouTube, which happens after 4000 hours of listening, or you get an advertiser which requires you to be a big enough show for an advertiser to want to participate. Until that point, you have no, there's no real signal of whether or not you're doing a good job. And so that, I think is one really useful feature of podcasting 2.0 is you get immediate feedback and you get it on every episode too. So if you do a bad episode, you get a couple of bad comments, you go, okay, they didn't like it onto the next one. If you do a great episode, you get ten times more comments and you go, wow. I had no idea this many people were listening. So yeah, you're right.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:07:39:
It's like a much more fun comments, right, Kev? Like comments you could still get from other mediums web 2.0. Right. But the fact that people will throw like, oh, 10,000, 100,000 Sats because this episode was great and you see that bottom line change too. That's the real new signal that you get out of it.
Kevin Rooke - 01:07:57:
Yeah. And the comments, they tend to be higher quality and they tend to be more positive. I found if someone's going to tell you this was a bad episode, you're actually going to get most of those comments on YouTube. It's not going to be the person who sent you 10,000 sats and then told you it was a bad episode because that doesn't make any sense. So you avoid a lot of the trolls and the kind of destructive comments that you might find elsewhere.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:08:30:
I love that you get just that constructive criticism to people that are willing to support and just there to troll. That's excellent.
Kevin Rooke - 01:08:39:
Yeah, for sure.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:08:40:
But yes. While we're still on Podcast 2.0, I want to plug the second Zeus product that we've shipped. It's called Echo. So if you go to echoln.com, we've got a Podcasting 2.0 web player. And this is another application that I made. Starting to just scratch my own niche. Basically uses Lightning Node Connect, that new protocol that we've just built into Zeus. You get a pairing phrase from Lightning Terminal, pop it in, you're connected to your node. Then you could search the tens of millions of podcasts on the Podcasting index. I believe. I think there is close to 100,000 or is it 10,000 shows up.
Kevin Rooke - 01:09:19:
It's 10,000 now.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:09:20:
Yeah, 10,000. Okay. You could add those, they get saved to your local storage. You can start streaming and you just set the the rate at which you want to share sats to the episode. And you're listening in. You hit the minute mark and you get a notification that your node is trying to make payments and you'll see which ones go through, which ones don't, which get tried again and you can make your comments your boostograms to the podcast producers. It's great. Admittedly, we just got it started last month at Tabcom in Atlanta. I sort of just made it a mission to hack together something with Lightning Node Connect and the new tools have helped build for it. But it's a great alternative if you don't want to be using like a separate wallet for doing this Podcasting 2.0 and you want to have a good way of listening to your shows at home. Check out Echo. It's echoln.com.
Kevin Rooke - 01:10:20:
Very cool, excited to try it out. I want to touch on one more topic here. And we talked about the sustainability of projects and I want to talk about the business model for Zeus and figure out, like, I know you have a contributor page, I believe, on the site. And I want to get a better idea of how you see the funding of Zeus evolving over time. Is it primarily going to come from donations in perpetuity? Where does revenue come from over time? Would love to just dive into the sustainability of the operations of Zeus.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:11:04:
Yeah, sure thing. So great question, Kevin, I'm not going to lie. Funding an open source project is immensely difficult, having made a crazy amount of money on it, but we've very graciously accepted a couple of grants. Like, we got one from the Human Rights Foundation for a Bitcoin a couple of years back, which was amazing. So grateful for their work. And then more recently we have a contributors page where we have three tiers. We have Olympians, Gods and mortals depending on how much you donate. And you get a display on our about page on the Zeus website as well as a display on the Zeus app back in the Help and about pages. So yeah, you get your Twitter account linked to as well as your profile pick and we actually rank people depending on how much they've donated. So if you want to make a second, third and fourth donation, you could potentially leapfrog other people in the list and make your way up that leaderboard. So we're messing around with a couple of interesting different models like that. We want to just make it fun for people to contribute to a project they really like and get some recognition for doing so and just mess around with the incentives that all Bitcoiners will tell you are paramount. So messing around with that and it's been great. Honestly, we've gotten a lot more in just like donations out of sheer generosity than some Lightning based businesses have made in revenue, which is something crazy. And honestly I would love to just make this full time endeavor and just work on it all the time, but I still think that we're a little while out from that. So it's going to be a transition as we start offering up commercial services. So that's largely going to be out of Lightning service provider. So stuff like liquidity if you need channels, if you need your channel state backed up, stuff like that. I don't want to get into too much details, but largely I think the majority of any commercial services would be coming from providing liquidity or connectivity with channels in and out to you.
Kevin Rooke - 01:13:39:
Right, okay, so maybe some future revenue from that, but until then, primarily funding through donations.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:13:48:
Yeah. So I would say we want to get out are more user friendly at first, but the LSP stuff might come before that. We'll see where that's sort of an interesting point right now, but definitely working on those two things and yeah, I'm just trying to make sure that there's a lot of uncertainty, especially in the markets today. Like if you try to get some money from a Bitcoin crypto VC or whatever. It's a little perilous considering the market conditions, so definitely not the right time to do that. But I believe in due time we'll get to a place where we want to be and be able to provide some incredible services up to our users.
Kevin Rooke - 01:14:32:
Love it.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:14:32:
Yeah, it's going to happen sooner than later. Just hang tight, just lower your time preferences.
Kevin Rooke - 01:14:40:
It's always good advice. I want to jump into a segment I do at the end of every show. It's called the Lightning round. Got a few rapid fire questions for you. I hope you're enjoying the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered platform for generating high quality transcripts of all your audio or video content. They combine AI engines and hundreds of human workers all over the world who are paid over the Lightning Network to assemble these transcripts. And that's what let Stakwork create better, faster and less expensive transcripts. To see the results for yourself, you can check out my personal website where I host transcripts for all my podcast episodes. If you want to learn more about Stakwork, visit stakwork.com. That is stakwork.com. If you could change anything about the Lightning Network, what would you change?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:15:35:
More user privacy. Number one, there's still a lot that could be ascertained being in the middle listening to payments. So number one, let's get more people using skid aliases. Number two, blinded routes. Number three, L2, and channel factories will make things a lot better. So yeah, more privacy.
Kevin Rooke - 01:15:58:
Number one, you mentioned at the beginning of the show that Zeus has about 10,000 users a year from now. How many users will Zeus have?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:16:09:
Hopefully at least 50% more. We just want to keep growing at a good clip and I think that is sustainable. I think a lot of people who may have been put off by Tor issues are going to really like the LNC experience. So if you can put a Lightning terminal on top of your LND it runs cool.
Kevin Rooke - 01:16:26:
How many human beings do you think have made a Lightning payment in the last 30 days?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:16:36:
Oh boy, that's such a good question. I don't know. Last 30 days? Hundreds of thousands for sure. Hopefully millions, but not too sure about that.
Kevin Rooke - 01:16:50:
Yeah, right on the cusp there.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:16:52:
Yeah, it's got to be right on the cusp. It's sort of hard to measure though. On Bitcoin you could count the transactions on chain, but it's a little more opaque there.
Kevin Rooke - 01:17:05:
Yeah, that's fair. Has there been any book that has meaningfully changed your view on the world?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:17:15:
Countless. Let me think of a good one that I've read recently. Forth Turning has been really good, really like that. And thinking back to the other historical examples of big precipices of major change in civilization, and I truly do believe Bitcoin is one of them. I've been talking to a lot of people about the ethics of money production, especially now that crypto fraud has sort of been washed aside. People really need to do some self reflection and just consider how money is issued and what that all looks like. And I think that book really does a fantastic job of doing that. Plus, it's free on muses.org, so no excuse not to read that book. Nice. Yeah. Definitely recommend those two.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:12:
If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be Bitcoin, what asset would it be?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:18:21:
Probably land, but there is a lot of uncertainty still. I don't know. I'm sure there's a lot of companies in stock that you can get by very well holding, but I don't know. The next ten years, things are changing quite quickly. Maybe that company is not even around right now, so it's hard to say. Probably land, but comes with its own set of challenges.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:49:
Fair enough. Who is one builder in the Bitcoin or Lightning ecosystem that you want to give a shout out to for the great work they're doing?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:19:01:
Sure. I think someone who doesn't get a lot of attention or shine really, is Oli Gugger from Lightning Labs. I think he has made incredible contributions on LND and other places in the ecosystem. Yeah, I don't think he gets enough credit. He's amazing.
Kevin Rooke - 01:19:23:
Cool. All right, thank you so much for the time. Before you go, where can listeners go to learn more about you and Zeus?
Evan Kaloudis - 01:19:32:
Okay, so anyone who's on Twitter, we are @evankaloudis. That's K-A-L-O-U-D-I-S. My full name spelled out. Zeus is @ZeusLN. You can find us on telegram ZeusLN is our group there. We got a lot of people there, but really everything is on GitHub. Free and open source AGPL v3 license. You can forge Zeus, do whatever you want with it. Pretty much that's at github.com/zeusln/zeus. If you want to just get an overview of the project. We also got a website at zeusln.app. We just dropped version 0.7.0 beta 1 with all those cool features we talked about today. And in about a week, fingers crossed, we should be on all the general app stores, so keep your eyes peeled for that.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:23:
Very cool. Thanks again for the time. I hope we can do it again soon.
Evan Kaloudis - 01:20:27:
Great. Thanks for having me, Kevin.
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