Calle - 00:00:00:
Today you can become a bitcoin core developer who is supported by one of these funds without ever revealing your identity. This is where the Internet really shines. In science, there is no way you can make progress without sharing your work. You need to present it to the world. And if you're strict about everything, then it also needs to be reproducible by someone else. So inherently, in scientific process itself, there is this sharing of methods. It's a great way of looking at the world that we can work together on projects that we find interesting and important and then share the results for free for everyone and at the same time tell everyone, take it and do with it whatever you want. Cashu is probably, for the listeners, it will be the most exotic topic because it's very different from what we know as bitcoiners. I would love a future where we look back into our world and see these mega corporations spring up and just be a blip in the history of the Internet.
Kevin Rooke - 00:01:05:
Calle is a Lightning developer who has worked on all sorts of Lightning projects, including Lightning Tipbot, Ln Bits and Cashu. In our conversation, we discussed the Cambrian Explosion of Lightning development happening lately, the importance of open source software, eCash Mints, and then we got into the work that Calle is doing on Ln Bits and Cashu. Calais has also asked to have his share of today's show splits sent to Open sats. So, if you enjoy this show and if you learn something new, the best way you can show your support for myself and Opensats is to send in sats over the Lightning Network. You can use any Podcasting 2.0 app. There are dozens, 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. 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. Calais, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to talk about all that you're building. Before we get into it, let's start with your background. Tell listeners about how you discover bitcoin and why you decided to build on Lightning.
Calle - 00:02:29:
First of all, thanks for having me. I'm a great fan of your show and finally here today. So, I'm Calle: Lightning, bitcoin Lightning developer, involved in several different projects, which we're probably going to talk about today. So my bitcoin story is if I go way back and this is way early, it took me quite some time to get into bitcoin myself, but the first time I heard of bitcoin, I remember someone told me about it and I thought, wait, that sounds like BitTorrent for money. That was my first impression of it. As I said, it took way longer than that to get into it. So I've been dabbling with it, and I got much more involved recently by becoming a developer in this space, and that was due to Lightning. So first when I first started working on my first project myself, really digging into the protocol and all the little nitty gritty details of everything, that's when I started to really understand what's going on and start contributing myself.
Kevin Rooke - 00:03:41:
Was there a particular turning point where you decided, okay, this money idea is cool, but I really have to build on Lightning? What compelled you to decide that you should be building in space?
Calle - 00:03:54:
It's an interesting question because although I was using Lightning back in the early days of Eclair Wallet, the testnet wallets of Async who are now building the Bitfinex Wallet and Eclair Mobile Denote, they had this testnet version of their Eclair Mobile wallet back then, which isn't alive anymore. I used that pretty early on, but it took me I was still scared of Lightning in a sense that I knew it was in a multi sig. I knew that there was the risk of losing the funds and everything. So those couple of things scared me a little bit away from it, so that I never really looked into it seriously. And actually almost more than two years passed by, I think, until I wanted to develop a web app. So maybe I can just briefly talk about it because although the app itself doesn't matter, I think it shows how developers like myself find their way into Lightning because it solves an actual problem. And this app was a port scanner, an online port scanner for the Tor network. So it's a pretty standard security tool, basically something that, you know, from the Clear net for a very long time. And there wasn't anything available for a Tor network like that on the Internet. So I wanted to build this website that does that and accept payments for it, micropayments, so that we can just at least pay the server who's doing that just ask for a minimal amount. And that was actually my first time when I started building something that used Lightning just to get the server cost back in. And so, I started looking into different ways of accepting payments online using Lightning and just digging down deeper and deeper into the rabbit hole until I started running my own node, building software on that, building software for managing my node, and now being involved in all sorts of different Lightning related projects.
Kevin Rooke - 00:06:05:
Now, you recently did an AMA on Stacker News, and I read through it, and you had a section where you talk about the Cambrian Explosion of Lightning development. To what do you attribute that to? What caused us to go from a couple of years ago, not much activity to today. Seems like every day there's a new project being released.
Calle - 00:06:30:
Yeah, I think we're definitely what feels like a turning point in terms of number of projects popping up. And I think there are several reasons for that. First of all, Lightning was barely usable itself two years ago. So your payments would fail if you would make a $5 payment. There was maybe 80% chance that you got to try again to make that payment. Now those times are over. If you have a fairly well managed node, then you'll be able to do large payments with a very high success rate and it's going to be fast. That's one thing for sure that makes Lightning so much more attractive today. But from a developer standpoint, you want to have, let's say, a test bed or a system where you can experiment without losing too much if you do something wrong. Now I know this is how many developers feel is when you make a mistake on chain, it's going to stay on chain forever. That's what the blockchain does. That's a scary thought, right? And you will make a lot of mistakes while building stuff. With Lightning, you can experiment on mainnet with a single satoshi. You can test your software with a single satoshi. You can do it 1000 times and it's going to cost you 1000 satoshi's. So that makes everything so much easier to just start there implementing a feature and see if it breaks or not. And so that is one thing. The reliability of Lightning is one. The second one is just the fact that you can do micropayments is the other one. So there is not much at stake. And I think but the most important thing is the third is that the tooling is here today. So a couple of years ago, you would have to almost make a whole implementation yourself in order to use the Lightning Network. Obviously, that's not something that any ordinary people are going to do, especially if you're not a big team. So there's this. And today we have APIs that can use your node very efficiently. One example is just LNBits. It's a project I'm working on with the team is basically if you install this, you have a Lightning node and if you install the software on top of it, you will get very easy to use Rest API and can use the Lightning Network to send and receive payments. So, with the same tools that every web developer or any sort of developer interacts with every day, including libraries using Rest APIs and so on, you can use the Bitcoin network today. And I think just making all this available and reaching a point where everything becomes more stable and reliable leads to the fact that, as you said today on the internet, you have almost what feels like every day, one website is launching where you can have a small Lightning balance and mobile apps launching where you can just send payments, use it for podcasting and so on and so forth. So, we're really at the beginning of the exponential curve, I think, of where we're seeing this space grow.
Kevin Rooke - 00:09:52:
Right. And do you think now we've achieved a level of stability and a level of tools for developers that enables all web developers to come over to Lightning and experiment themselves? Or is this still you still have to be a bitcoiner or like a really early adopter to want to experiment with Lightning today?
Calle - 00:10:16:
I think there are multiple ways of answering this question. So for sure it doesn't hurt to be a bitcoiner and to know exactly what you're doing. Because if you do everything, let's say, the most the safest and the best practice way, then you would run a bitcoin node yourself. On top of that, you would run a Lightning node yourself, so you would be in complete control of your funds. And on top of that, then you would build your software that is going to use the Lightning Network. Obviously, that takes quite some time to get into it. Imagine you're just a game developer and you have this game that is a racing car game, and you want to give satoshi's to the winners. Right now, it's a very simple problem to solve if you can already use some kind of rails to do that for you. But if you need to really build the whole infrastructure yourself for your project, which might be necessary for larger applications, then it will take you some time to just learn these tools, how to use them. So there is one thing that means if you're okay with using, let's say, a custodial solution where you have a small balance on top and you use their API, you're definitely there. So Lightning using Lightning is as simple as using an API today. However, I would still recommend everyone to really take their time to learn about how to set up a Lightning node and to run it themselves. Now, in terms of are we there yet? So do we see some kind of, let's say, tools emerging where I can be pretty sure that they will be around in three, four years, so I'm not very sure about that. So since everything is still changing fast, although Lightning itself works and the mechanisms behind Lightning are well tested, we're still adding features to it. For example, bolt twelve is coming up. So that means if you have software that runs with bolt eleven, bolts eleven is the second invoice format that we know from the Lightning Network today. And with bolt twelve, which is these extension proposals for Lightning in bolt twelve, we will have a new format called Offers, and that will make it possible to use static Identifiers to receive payments. Suddenly the thing, you know, it's a whole different thing that you're working with. And that means that the app that you're building, if it relies on the mechanisms behind bolt eleven, will probably have to change as well. If you want to use Bolt Twelve in the future. That doesn't mean that Bolt Eleven won't work anymore. It just means that it just shows that we are still in a very early phase of the whole protocol itself. And considering that, it's amazing what is already possible. So that's where I come from, I think we're still experimental. And although we're still experimental, we see this insane innovation happening on top of it, although our grounds are still a little bit shaky.
Kevin Rooke - 00:13:30:
And would you like to see if you were in charge here, would you like to see more of this experimentation happening on the Lightning protocol? Less? Do you think we're at a pretty reasonable middle ground today where the experimentation level is roughly correct? I'd love to hear when you talk about shaky ground or you talk about, like, we're still in this experimental phase. Is this where we should be?
Calle - 00:13:58:
I think we're right where we are, it feels like, to me. I mean, I just want to make an example. For example, I was just recently talking to Roy from Breez, and Breez is fantastic software running on your phone. It's a full LND Lightning node running on your phone, and there's a company behind this wallet. There's people working on that wallet, probably full time, earning salaries and so on. So, the concept of Breez wallet is that you run LND on your phone, right. So, as you might know, and its public information, Breez is transitioning to a whole different model now, which is running a CLN node in the cloud, using green light and using your mobile phone as a signing device for making transactions of a node that is in the cloud. So, the reason why I'm telling the story is you have these two extremely different approaches on how to handle Lightning payments mobile, and you have this company who has invested so much capital, time, effort into building this already great software called Breez. But we're still in a phase where companies such as Breez are ready to change their entire approach, just tear down all the walls and rebuild the house, because we're still in a phase where we can do this. It also shows how early we are. The number of users on the Lightning Network is still comparatively small, especially comparing it to the overall number of bitcoin users, where a tiny percentage still of capital number of payments happening on Lightning. It's hard to determine. We don't know how many Lightning transactions happen, but the players involved in building software on top of it are apparently, obviously ready to still reconsider entire frameworks to make their software ready for the future. I think that's very fascinating. A very interesting and good place to be, actually.
Kevin Rooke - 00:16:07:
Yeah. If you ever feel, I guess for listeners, if you ever feel like you're falling behind on the Lightning Network or you've missed the boat or whatever, this is helpful because, A, it's not too late. It's very, very early in lightning's development. And B, even the earliest companies who have been around for three or four years are still going back and redoing everything and reconsidering their entire approach. So that is good to know and it's helpful for me. And every now and then I get overwhelmed with all the activity and Lightning, and I go, wow, this is already happening. It almost feels like I wish I had started doing this a year earlier. But when you say things like that, it makes me feel a little bit better, and I can go, okay, everyone's still trying to figure this out. We haven't quite got it yet. We're working on it, and there's a lot of experimenting, but that's a very interesting anecdote from Breez. I want to shift to the topic of open source software. This is something that you, again, in your Stacker News AMA, you said you were attracted to open source software, and you had an interesting quote. You said, I think we can build a whole civilization on the ideals of open source, which is why I'm so happy that bitcoin exists. Talk to me about this whole civilization on open source ideas. How might that work?
Calle - 00:17:37:
So the reason I said that is because I think open source itself. So the idea of free and open source software and free meaning not free in the sense of you don't have to pay for it, which is still usually the case, but in the sense of sharing the code and making it available to others so they can use your code, change it and use it for their own projects. I think these ideals are almost, I want to say almost wholly ideal ideals because it shows us where the digital age might be heading or could be heading. Look, going a step back in the physical realm, we have resources, they're limited and they're scarce, and you have your belongings and you want to keep them separate from the belongings of others, you want to protect them, et cetera. It makes sense because you cannot infinitely copy an apple. You cannot just share an apple and have the same amount of apple that you had before. Now, this is the physical world, obviously, the world of ideas, the world of thoughts existed way longer than the software itself. So looking at the scientific world, for example, we can already see this new world emerging, I think. And I think this is also where the roots of open source software actually come from, which is from in a scientific tradition. In science, there is no way you can make progress without sharing your work. If you need to present it to the world, and if you're strict about everything, then it also needs to be reproducible by someone else. So inherently, in the scientific process itself, there is this sharing of methods that is part of it. Science is not considered quality science. If no one else on the planet can reproduce it. So this is where I find the parallels to open source movement. To open source movement. Although science has had insane impact on our civilization today, I think software can go one step further than that. With software you can be in your mom's basement. By reading a couple of books and blog articles and learning how to code, you can create something truly new. And I've experienced this myself, like by sitting with a couple of people together in a room and building something that becomes almost material. You can share it with someone on the other side of the planet and you can see that the hours you put into a project can really affect someone on the other side of the planet. It changes their world. And you can do this in the open source world. You can do this without. They don't know you, you don't know them, they don't pay you. But you also don't want to be paid because it's experimentation and you're not working alone. And the only way to actually achieve bigger goals is through cooperating with a large amount of people who also share your ideals. And I think that's summarizing all that. I think that it's a great way of looking at the world, that we can work together on projects that we find interesting and important and then share the results for free for everyone and at the same time tell everyone, take it and do with it whatever you want, except maybe for causing harm to others and so on. Then you can go into all sorts of details, into how to do the licensing of open source and so on. But I think that's just that's detailed stuff. I think the overall picture, the reason why I'm so fascinated by this is that we found a way where individuals, by putting some work into their passion, can really affect the lives of others around the planet. And they do that by cooperating and no one wants anything in return. Just the fact that you see that someone uses your software is already so beautiful that there will be many, many people just doing exactly that. Now, obviously everyone has to pay their bills and you need work and you need to sustain yourself somehow. And there's definitely that. And you should also support developers so they can survive in doing what they do. But at the end of the day, and I'm very sure about this, you can take all of these monetary incentives away and still find many people around the planet who will do exactly that build software and share it with everyone. So this is software, but since we're seeing that software is penetrating every part of our lives, right? So this is social networks, which is communication. It might be money with Bitcoin and all the other software that we use to manage our daily lives, I'm seeing this become more and more important at the same time we are seeing more and more concentration of powers in digital age. So basically the opponents of open source software are the big tech monopolies who don't share their software, who don't share their algorithms with which our social network feeds are curated, who don't share the data about you that they have about you and selling to the others and so on. So there is this dark and bleak outlook into the future that is this cypher punkish world where megacorporations who control every part of your life actually are so powerful. And then there's the opposite of that which I want to contribute in building, which is free people, self sovereign people around the planet not knowing each other, but still working on the same mission, sharing and collaborating. And I find this fascinating. I'm a big fan of it and I think every single developer or person who wants to join this movement is a very important addition to the whole process itself.
Kevin Rooke - 00:24:16:
Yeah, it strikes me that the issue here, where you talk about the divergence between the open source community and the closed source megacorporations does come down to money and licensing. I think that is why Apple and Microsoft and Google, Facebook have all these. They can earn a lot of money from closing off everyone else and building up a big wall around their projects. Do you see a way of bridging that gap and getting to the point where you can build open source software and there's a path to making a lot of money?
Calle - 00:24:55:
I don't know if there's a path to making a lot of money per se through open source itself. I mean, think of Linux. The whole planet runs on Linux. Did anyone become stupidly rich from that? I don't think that any individual really benefited extremely from Linux itself. There are many people on the planet who benefit from Linux also from an income wise. You have the developers for all the different distributions working on Linux. You have hundreds of probably millions of people just managing Linux installations and running these systems. So in a sense, this ecosystem of Linux already feeds a lot of mouse by just providing work to do on top of it, right? So in that sense, for sure, open source software can generate a lot of income and wealth for society by making use of this software. But still I have problems figuring out, just getting back to your question, how you could, if it's possible to combine open source software with this big concentration of wealth that we're seeing in these large companies like Google. If Google would open source their software, I would not use their service probably. I would probably take their code and run it on a server and share that server with my friends. Because if I don't need Google to do the same work, why would I use that? Of course Google could add additional services. I think that is probably the most viable path in the open source world. Where you provide software that is free, that everyone can run, but you can offer some kind of additional service on top of that. So that might be, I don't know, access to digital media that no one else has or just having good connectivity, your infrastructure or whatever. It could be many different ways of monetizing. Also with open source software it's definitely possible, but I'm not sure if it would lead to the same outcome of very strong, very big players who concentrate a lot of capital and I'm also not sure if I would want that. So I'm much more comfortable with a flat hierarchy in the sense of software, digital infrastructure and fond of people who are running their own services and sharing that with their circles.
Kevin Rooke - 00:27:35:
Now, when you think about whether or not a company or a person should should open source their software or keep it closed source, does it matter where they are in the technology stack? Like when I hear, when I hear Linux, I think this is the bedrock of computing and when I look at Bitcoin, I go, this is the bedrock of money on the internet. It's where it all begins. But then you have companies building on top and I wonder, I guess it's very important, of course, that Bitcoin is open source. Is it as important that the company on top of Bitcoin is also open source?
Calle - 00:28:14:
It is not as important. So definitely there is a hierarchy there as well. So the base layer should be completely open. Otherwise you won't find people building on top of it because you need it to be open. In order to build something robust on top of it. You need to be able to look really into it, propose changes if necessary, and have an army of programmers just testing everything and making sure that it's working. So in that sense, of course, you can build a closed source software on top of an open source system, but you will not find anyone who will improve your software because you're not opening it. In that sense, if you're looking for external involvement, then you should open source your software. If you are in a highly competitive environment where everyone steals everyone's code and tries to make more money of it than the first guy, then it's probably a better idea to not do to not open source your software in that sense. So I would say there is a clear tendency in the technology stack itself. The base should be as open as possible. On top of that, you can build companies and have your whole intellectual property in there as well without really affecting anyone next to you. But if you expect people to really make use of your software and push it to the next level, you should consider open sourcing it, building SDKs for it, building communities for it, meeting with people, helping them use their software and so on and so forth.
Kevin Rooke - 00:29:45:
Yeah, the idea that you introduced at the beginning that in the physical world we have all this scarcity and there's very good reason to close off your resources from other people. But in the digital world we don't. It makes me wonder whether or not we've just spent the last 50 years using an antiquated mental model for building the Internet. And now we are we are in this position where we have really large tech companies that have closed off their resources. And maybe we look back if we Zoom out really far, maybe, is there a case for looking? 500 years ahead and looking back at today going, wow. We were complete idiots for trying to apply this physical scarcity model to the Internet.
Calle - 00:30:37:
Yeah, I hope that you will be right because I would love a future where we look back into our world and see these megacorporations spring up and just be a blip in the history of the Internet. Because many people, and I'm also part of them, consider almost the fight for the Internet as lost in the sense when I started dabbling on the Internet as a kid, everything was very different. You would have almost only open source software on open networks with open protocols where everyone was just adding their stuff on top of it and most people were anonymous. And we had this vision of an Internet, of a cyberspace that is free and especially free from control of the physical world, of politics, of the, I don't know, financial markets and so on. But we lost that fight because today we see that the majority of Internet users are using centralized services and are happy to leave their data with everyone. And every now and then we have a hack where people start talking about it, but pretty quickly we forget about it again. Whose fault is that? I don't know if it's anyone's fault at all, but I can also say that I have a much more optimistic view on the future today than I had five or ten years ago, before things like Bitcoin were here as well. Because money is one of the most important factors in this whole system. If you want to build open protocols and use a centralized money exchange service to finance that or just to make things possible. Because thinking back of my example in the beginning with the tour service that you want to offer to users for port scanning, imagine I would have done that with a credit card. I mean, it sounds absurd because it's a privacy tool and then you have to leave your credit card identity with the service provider. But that's actually what we had. This is the reality of things before Bitcoin. And that tells me also it's no wonder that the open source project was a little bit left behind because we didn't want to do that. We don't want to have a put your credit card ID field here, give me your KYC, name here in order to download my software, use that or whatever. Now we have money for the internet that is private and self controlled and completely open source, literally from the people, for the people with many instances of top down control attempts that were fought off. So it has proven itself as well that it can stay decentralized and in the hands of its users and not big corporations. So bitcoin is an ideal ground fertilizer for the open source movement itself. It can help the next generation of software to finance itself on the internet to build much more interesting applications without compromising the user's privacy and really digital rights.
Kevin Rooke - 00:34:07:
Right. So is it fair to say that at a time when we had closed source money only as the tool through which you can fund open source developers? Those developers may may have been they have lost a bit of their ability to monetize their work because they only have in the example you mentioned, you only have the ability to use a credit card to monetize your work there. You don't have this permissionless protocol where anyone can send you money, but now you do. So does the fact that we now have open source money open up new opportunities for open source developers to monetize?
Calle - 00:34:55:
Yeah, for sure. So, first of all, if you look at bitcoin specifically, you can see that many developers today are supported by organizations such as Opensats, HRF, Brink is one of the most important one I would consider. All of these developers are financed through funds that are where people can donate into and those funds are distributed to developers. Today you can become a bitcoin core developer who is supported by one of these funds without ever revealing your identity in the sense of your physical name, address and so on. So it is possible, something is possible that was strictly not possible before. That is one thing. The other thing is just iteration of what we had before. You can build software, you can put it on a web server and offer it to the entire world and within a couple of minutes you can set up software to accept money for distributing your project. This wasn't possible before. Even if you don't care about privacy, just try to get a credit card terminal on your website. Just you would have to make yourself naked. You would probably have to wait for months until that small button appears there. And yes, as I said before, you're also throwing the privacy of your users under the bus. It just doesn't feel right. And I think bitcoin for sure. Besides just opening up new ways of organizing and markets for software on the internet, which is also springing up where you can pay someone directly to do a job for you on the internet, we're also seeing a new way of support for open source from nonprofit organizations. And I think what we've witnessed a couple of days ago with Nostr and Jack Dorsey chipping in. So for those who haven't seen that, nostril is an open source communication protocol developed by lots of interesting people. It's invented by fiat, so it's been growing and gaining a lot of traction. And then one day, Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, found it and probably fell immediately in love with it because he was looking for an open source and decentralized alternative for Twitter itself. And I think Nostr has a good shot at becoming something like that. So within what felt like 12 hours or so from discovery of this project to making a donation of 14 bitcoin to the Developer Fund of Open Source developer Fund of Nostr. It was 12 hours in between where he found it, looked through it, decided he wants to chip in and pressed a few buttons, and the money was there. So how are you going to do that with a banking system that no one at either side of the end knows where the person lives, what their real name is? Maybe. But still, there is enough trust to do this transaction, but all the necessary, let's say, baggage of the fiat world just we can leave it completely behind and start building as a new economy.
Kevin Rooke - 00:38:30:
I hope you're enjoying the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor, Voltage. Voltage empowers engineers to integrate bitcoin and Lightning Network payments into their business stack with an enterprisegrade experience. The team at Voltage is building the complete tool set so that you can do more than simply spin up nodes, but also understand and interpret your node's data. Their new product, Surge, gives engineers the capability to quickly solve problems and optimize operations. With node insights and visibility through time series data, you get dynamic and complex insights never available before. You can get complete control with insanely fast onboarding advanced client side encryption and zero management infrastructure, making backups networking and upgrades simple. Get a free seven day trial today at Voltage.cloud. Yeah, that was a very interesting donation from Jack. I believe he funded 14 bitcoins to support Fiatjaf and Nostr development. And I wonder if this is something that you think could become a preferred method of funding open source work and projects that wealthy individuals just want to see succeed. If everyone on the Forbes 100 who's deploying money to charities in a very opaque way today, do you think that they eventually realize, hey, we can just do this on bitcoin, it'll be a lot faster, save us a lot of overhead?
Calle - 00:40:00:
Of course they can today, now the chance. Or they could do it through bitcoin, which they couldn't do before, but to be honest, I would need more data points to really see a trend there. Obviously what Jack did is great, but I don't see it too much happening from many others at the same time. Of course, these, let's say, large corporations like Google, they also fund a lot of open source development just because they rely on it and just to make sure that the software is properly maintained and developed. They also pour a lot of funds into open source development through funds like these. But I'm yet to see other wealthy individuals like Jack Dorsey pouring money into their favorite projects just to see it grow.
Kevin Rooke - 00:40:50:
Okay, now let's transition to the open-source work that you are doing. You've got a few different projects, actually. One is called Lightning Tip Bot. One is Ln Bits. One is Cashu. Why don't we run through those three and just give listeners a better understanding of how they work? Maybe we can start with Lightning Tip bot and you can just give everyone an overview of how it works and the adoption you're seeing today.
Calle - 00:41:14:
All right, so Lightning Tip Bot is a telegram bot. So Telegram is a social network and chat app which many bitcoiners use. That's why we built a bot for Telegram. And this bot is called Lightning Tipbot. And what it is basically is a wallet inside your Telegram account. And what you can do with it is that, first of all, you can receive funds through the Lightning Network onto your account and you can send them out again. And Lightning Tip out itself is made for newbies. It is very joyful and fun and tries to just make it an easy and good user experience to use bitcoin Lightning. And I think we were fairly successful with that from what I know. I've heard lots of people just having their first experiences with bitcoin through that bot because the bot itself has social features like tipping in a channel. You can make faucets inside the channel, you can just fundraise inside the channel and so on. So, there are a lot of groups out there who use Telegram for their social lives, but also use lightning tip or on top of that to give it some sort of new experiences that you can do with bitcoin. And at the same time, we also implemented a bunch of very cool, interesting features and all the newest LN-URL features inside of it. So in a sense, it's also kind of a test bed for me and the other developers for testing new technologies with a user base that is large enough to really see effects, whether the users like it or whether they break it and so on. I can just recommend everyone to check it out. If you want, you can go to Ln.Tips, like Lightningnetwork.Tips, and you'll see the bot make an account and just play with it.
Kevin Rooke - 00:43:18:
Yeah, there's Lightning tip bot. There's another one LNTXBot I had FiatJaf on who was discussing his work there. And then there's a couple of others. I've seen one on Reddit. I don't know what it's using. Is it using Lightning tip bot or lntx bot? But there's definitely times when someone will send like 500 sats to someone else on Reddit, I've seen versions of it on Twitter, and I wonder you might have a better perspective on this than I would. How many people do you think are sending back and forth these little tips across all these services we just mentioned? Just the Twitter, the Reddit, the telegram, back and forth, tips from users to users, if you had to guess.
Calle - 00:44:06:
If I had to guess, I mean, if I had to guess, I would probably also have to include Stacker News because you have the most purest form of tipping each other through generating content. But if I had to guess, I would say it's probably in the upper tens of thousand approaching hundreds of thousands of payments a day. I would say it's a very large number. And generally speaking, I mean, the idea is not that old and we wanted to see that for a long time on the internet, which is that you post something and instead of leaving a like, you just leave some satoshi's there and there could be 20 satoshi, 100 satoshi for something that you just enjoyed. And that is actually also the reason why we started with this project of Lightning tip bot. Because the story behind it is actually I have a meme group with a lot of people I don't know, but it's a fairly large meme group and where we share memes that have nothing to do with Bitcoin. It's just an ordinary meme group and we wanted a mechanism to tip those memes with satoshi's just to see what Normies no coiners do. When you introduce this monetary incentive to generate content for the group itself, it was very funny. People started picking up on jokes on that. You had workers protesting for better working conditions, workers being those people who make memes and so on, just put a joke on top of a joke on top of a joke. And so this shows that you also introduce new social aspects into content generation by really leaving people a sign of appreciation that has actual value, which is bitcoin.
Kevin Rooke - 00:45:52:
There's a part of me that thinks sats are going to entirely replace likes on the internet. It makes a lot more sense that there's something at stake. And we're starting to see. I mean, we see on Twitter right now. Elon's fighting bots all day. We see inflated numbers on usage periodically. We see little scandals of like Google has been inflating the number of visitors on certain sites, and there's no easy way to prevent that. Bots can come in and just absolutely flip upside down all the metrics that you as a creator or a website owner are keeping an eye on, and they can do it at a very little cost. So it makes a lot of sense to me that we do transition to an era where money is the signal and that there's some sort of cost in… Sure, you can send 100 tips to this person and make it look like they have 100 likes, but it's going to cost you 100 times whatever the tip amount is. And I think that it's a more fair system, and it's one that can beat the bots at their own game, because the bots, as much as they can create clicks and they can create likes, they can't create money.
Calle - 00:47:19:
There's a part of me who agrees with you, and I see the transition into likes of being a clear signal, and especially against fighting bots. It's a fantastic mechanism, no doubt about that. But there is also a part of me who says this whole concept would work out in the ideal social sense if the population of the planet had comparable incomes or just comparable wealth. And that is not the case, right? We usually have these exponential distributions with very long tails of a few very wealthy individuals and just a bunch of people with almost nothing. So does it also mean that online, on our online spaces, your voice should be louder because you can pay up more? I mean, in a sense, we're already there because money also means influence and more people will follow you if you're a billionaire and so on. At the same time, if you have money, you can also get a botnet that presses on the like button there's. That my skeptical part about that says if you make the connection between money and voice even more direct, it can also lead to outcomes that are very predictable in the sense that you would see that only those and I'm not talking only about super rich, just making tweets that everyone needs to see or something. I'm talking about the difference between the UK and Bangladesh here. Are we going to build an Internet where the Bangladeshi will never find a voice because they have only a couple of sets in their wallet? I'm not so sure. I think probably the ideal is somewhere in between, where we will mix different approaches. I like the approach of verifying that you're a human by setting up a bond, for example, and but what the height of this bond is how much money you have to put up in order to prove that you're human. I think very, at least for me, a very unexplored field. I know that Twitter itself is having their problems with their checkmarks such that you have a fair distribution across the planet on how much you have to put up to get the check mark and so on. But I guess also something I think this also shows how early we are in experimenting with these kind of things, because up until now, the Internet wasn't driven by any of these questions. It was basically if you have a botnet, you have control and that's it, right?
Kevin Rooke - 00:50:08:
And maybe to push back on your point about how we could have people in different parts of the world that aren't able to satisfy certain requirements of putting up money. It could also act as an equalizing force if designed a little bit differently. You could see how if every tip or every like represents a certain amount of sats, it opens people in third world countries up to the first world countries economies directly. If I have a good idea, it doesn't matter where I live. If I make a viral video it cost me a couple of pennies to create it, maybe to avoid bots and maybe that is more expensive for me in a third world country but I'm now open to the entire world's economy.
Calle - 00:51:00:
Absolutely. And this is where the internet really shines and especially in combination with Bitcoin, you can have a truly global marketplace for ideas and for products, for software for example, you can be a Bangladeshi, write software and get paid by anyone and you compete with literally anyone. So we have an equal playground where everyone has the same rules and you put up something and if it solves the problems of people around the world then you will get rewarded for it. At least that's where I want us to be. That will be a great place to be because right now all the other distribution frameworks for spreading your work out to the world really depend on where you are, what access you have to the systems in place there and with just an internet connection and that's basically it. That's everything you need. You have the same opportunity to get paid for your work everywhere on the planet and that's a great thing that.
Kevin Rooke - 00:52:09:
That might really change the dynamics of the way the way economies are structured like we have. You know, in North America, I think there's a lot of people that believe, especially now with remote work, that a lot of office jobs are either not required or are people doing like an hour or two of work? A day and still being paid an enormous salary, which anyone in a third world country would be happy to take half of for 10 hours a day of work. And so if now these two are converging, you start to get to a point where it's going to be very competitive and I wonder if on the flip side, like this can really help elevate people out of third world countries. On the flip side, I don't think a lot of people in first world countries are thinking through the ramifications that their jobs are going to get a lot harder and they may not be able to defend their giant salary for much longer.
Calle - 00:53:10:
Absolutely. And I also don't know a solution to this. Also I don't know if there should be a solution to it because it sounds like a more fair world where everyone is paid for their capabilities and not just by chance of being born in a certain coordinate on the planet. And it may sound a bit naive to some, but I don't care because the Internet is showing us that it's going to that direction. And especially since the Pandemic and so on, we've seen that most of the work can be done online. This is where it's heading. I'm very happy that we also have a financial system now, Bitcoin, that can accompany us through that path by kind of building this global network of people working together and for each other.
Kevin Rooke - 00:54:08:
Absolutely. Okay, let's get into the next project that you're working on, LNBits. Can you let people know you briefly described at the beginning of the conversation, but give people a high-level understanding of how LNBits works?
Calle - 00:54:23:
All right, so LM Bits is absolutely great software. I'm very happy to be part of this team. And what it basically does is to supercharge your Lightning Node to make it very brief. So you have an ordinary Lightning node that could be anything. It's either LND, CLN, eclair. There are many, many back ends that Lmbit supports. And you can imagine running a Lightning Node on top of the Lightning node. You can plug LNBits. And what LNBits does is to first give you a user interface for creating now, Lightning Wallets. That are what wallets. You can use yourself or you can share with your friends. So they can use your Lightning Node as a wallet. So they start off with zero sats and then receive payments and make payments through your notes. So basically, you can become the Uncle Jim of your community, of your family and so on. LNBits itself has a ton of extensions, which is also one of the reasons why it's so popular. Because now you cannot only make Lightning Wallet, as I described before, but you can enable all sorts of extensions, a bit like WordPress, where you have a blog, and then you can just enable one extension after the other, and those add a ton of functionality to your Lightning node. So all the LN-URL things but you can do things like if you're a video streamer, there is an extension for your video stream, so you can get donations on your video stream and trigger gifts and stuff like that. If you want to sell a domain name, for example, there is an extension to sell domain sub domains for a short period of time and so on. So there are many different things that people have come up with bold cards, LN-URL, as I said, and all sorts of things that you can multiply the abilities of your Lightning Node. This is one thing I would say is one of the biggest reasons why people are so much in love with LNBits. The reason why I am in love with LNBits or why I fell in love with LNBits was a very different one, though. So you remember I was talking about Lightning Tipbot before, and I started working on Lightning Tipbot before, before I really knew how to deal with the intricacies of a Lightning Node, especially the accounting stuff, is a bit scary, right? You want to build software and you want to really make sure that you know exactly how much every user has in their wallet. So, you got to build it up all yourself, or, and this is how I discovered LNBits. You can just use LNBits for that. So Lightning Tipot itself uses Ln Bits as a back end for the wallets of the individual users. So Lmbit itself basically gives you a very accessible API, it's a rest API, which you can use to generate invoices for a wallet, pay invoices from a wallet, and so on. All the functionality that LNBit can do is also available as an API. Now, if you're a software developer, that is great because you want to use Bitcoin in your project and you don't want to spend months and months just building the rails to use Bitcoin, you can use LNBits. And nice thing, since it also supports different node implementations, it doesn't really matter what your infrastructure is today. If you have a node already, you can just install this thing on top of it and then start building software on top of LNBits. And we're seeing many softwares being written websites that accept payments, Lightning Tipbots, they're just a ton of transactions inside of Telegram using LNbits wallets and all sorts of other very interesting and nice projects that keep popping up.
Kevin Rooke - 00:58:05:
What are some of the most exciting ones that some of maybe people are building already, but I'm really interested in the ones that you know are possible but are not really being built yet.
Calle - 00:58:17:
That's a very good question, because whenever we have an idea, we immediately start working on it and that's why we have such a large number of extensions. But there's a couple of ones that we're working on right now, or at least are in the planning phase, which I would want to see become reality. So one of them is a stable stats account where you can take some portion of your satoshi's and if you don't want to be subject to the fluctuations of Bitcoin, you can use an eliminate extension to hedge a part of that on an exchange that goes short bitcoin, and you can keep a stable dollar balance. This is something that many, many people find important. The nice thing about this approach is that you really don't touch Fiat at all. You basically just open a financial instrument using your Bitcoin and that gives you this stability in price. And I think another thing that I really would like to see, because we're seeing now more and more merchants using LNBits, and they're also using Bolt cards, which are these NFC cards where you can make payments from an LNBits account, for example, or from any other Lightning Wallet, basically, that supports Ln Europe Withdraw. You can use these cards to make payments. So, there are merchants who run either LNBits in their iPad as a point of sale or in their dedicated point of sale device. And a lot of them, when we talk to them, these are no coiners. They don't know what to do with the bitcoin. Often they don't know how to custody the bitcoin when they start their journey. But many of them are open to accepting bitcoin because for them, it would be just another way of accepting a payment. And there are many people working on this problem. But at the end of the day, what you want to achieve with such a system is you want to be able to pay with bitcoin in and get fiat out, and ideally, choose whether you want to keep it in bitcoin, but always have the option to get fiat out. And of course, this is a problem when you build software, because touching Fiat is always a bad idea while building software. So, one of the things I'm imagining, which I want to build really dearly, but I'm waiting for other things to come in place for that, is to have something like an automatic loop out thing into your fiat bank account using an exchange account that you already have. So, I imagine, for example, you have a Kraken account already and you have this software LNBit software running in your cafe. And we also have a hardware wallet that works, hardware wallet that works in your browser. So what the whole package would kind of be at the end of the day, when you have sold hundreds of coffees, you can basically, when your balance increases to a certain threshold, you can loop parts of it out to a hardware wallet to not keep it all on a hot Lightning wallet. And another part of that you can send directly to Kraken, to your KYC account and via APIs, deposit the money there, and then market sell bitcoin, for example, get your Fiat and just immediately dump it on your Fiat bank account. A flow like that would be amazing because first of all, me, as a software developer, I could start building this experience for someone without doing the KYC for them, without handling the Fiat for them. At the same time, I believe this is a great path to increase Bitcoin adoption. Because first of all, you enable Bitcoiners to pay for more things with their bitcoin. And at the same time, for the merchant seeing what bitcoin can do. I believe this will cause many merchants to consider keeping their bitcoin, keeping parts of their income in bitcoin and so on. So I think making bitcoin as fluid as possible, making it interchangeable to any other thing that you want to exchange it to as easily as possible, is one of the ways to make bitcoin succeed. You hear this many times from Nocoiners when they first touch bitcoin. They say, what do I do with it now? What they actually mean is, how do I get a dollar out of it or how do I also buy something? But that's actually the next step for many people. So if you can give someone bitcoin and don't have to answer that question because everyone knows it's just a click of a button, I get the money that I'm used to, which is the fiat money, that gives you a kind of a security feeling of that you can actually use this thing, and whenever you decide against it, you can go out of this thing. And I think this also aligns with the bitcoin ethos itself, which is being a purely voluntary system where you have minimal friction of getting in and getting out. And then the thesis, of course, is that people will choose to stay in on the long run.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:27:
Love it. So, if we use an example of my hand as a tool, LNBits is really an extension. It's like a Swiss Army knife for my hand in the same way that LNBits is an extension on a lightning node. I think I got that analogy correct, roughly. Is that right? It's just like you can take your hand, what it can do, and all the objects that you can lift up or move or start a fire or whatever. And now you have this Swiss Army knife, and you can just do a lot more and you have a Lightning node and now LNBits just lets you do more with it, correct?
Calle - 01:04:05:
Right, yeah, absolutely. So your Lightning node itself can actually only send and receive payments and certain variations of that, but not much more. And it's okay. We want to keep it simple as possible. You plug LNBits on top of it, becomes this multi tool of being able to do many, many different things that I was just started to explain. But the nice thing is all these functions are separate extensions that you can enable and disable, but you can also combine them. So we've been seeing users doing things that we never thought about before. For example, there is one extension that is a split payments extension, which is something like similar to what you're using for this podcast, where if money comes into a wallet, then you can predefined other wallets or Lightning addresses where it will be split according to a predefined split and then go on to these other wallets. And then we've seen people taking this extension and then putting another extension on top for one of the users, where if the threshold becomes large enough, then execute another action and just chaining extensions on top of each other, building almost apps by themselves. So there's a lot of stuff happening that we didn't really anticipate as well. But I think that just comes with enabling users to do things that they haven't been able to do before. And it's great to see that people just come up with stuff that no one has thought about before.
Kevin Rooke - 01:05:31:
That's amazing. Now let's get into the last of the three I want to touch on today: Cashu you're working on. Can you talk a bit about what Cashu is and maybe the concept of Ecash mints for those who aren't familiar?
Calle - 01:05:46:
Yes, for sure. So cashew is probably for the listeners, it will be the most exotic topic because it's very different from from what we know as Bitcoiners. And I'm going to try to explain that. So, cash is a Chaumian ecash system, and Chaumian eCash, the name comes from David Chaum, the inventor of the system. That was in 1982, he published a paper for for making private payments possible on on the Internet, for example, although the Internet wasn't as popular back then, but it's a way to make private payments, right. So Ecash itself, the concept of how to build that Chaum came up with. And just to recap the history of eCash real quick, in 1995, they actually started a company called Digi Cash, which built a software that was pre PayPal time. So you really have to go back. There was software that used Ecash to pay for things online. So the idea was to build a payment system online that you can use but that is untraceable and anonymous, as opposed to, for example, what we use today. I mean, what is used in the Fiat system today, which is mostly apps like PayPal and other financial service apps who know exactly what you're doing, who you are, and who you're interacting with. Right. So how does Chaumian ecash achieve this at all? And the core idea of this is that instead of having a ledger in which I have all the entries of my users, what they're doing, right. For example, if you think of PayPal, for example, they will have a database at home, and on the database it will say, Kelly has an account and this is his balance. And now Calle takes $100 and sends to Kevin. So, in database what will happen? They will subtract $100 from my account and add $100 to your account. That means that the financial intermediary, their PayPal in this example, knows exactly what we're doing, and they need to know it because otherwise they couldn't build their software. They couldn't make sure that I don't double spend my money or whatever. So Chaumian eCash is built completely differently from this. And the way it works is the following: So, you would as now let's think of Digi Cash, because they were actually handling Fiat, and you would send a wire transfer money into their bank account of Digi Cash. And in return for that, you get something called Ecash. And Ecash is a piece of data. And this piece of data looks completely random, but you take this data and you store it in your hard drive. Now, for Bitcoiners, this is the exotic part, because we're used to blockchains. So where you have the data is stored somewhere in the Bitcoin network, and you keep your keys on your hard drive and using those keys, you can then move the money that is on chain, right? So this is the flow that we usually know. You don't have the money in your hard drive. The money is on the blockchain. Now, with Ecash, it's kind of the other way around. You have the money on your hard drive. It's a piece of data that you receive from the issuer of this E cash and you keep it. Now, if I want to send it to you, what I don't do is I don't go to the bank, for example, and say, please send $100 to Kevin. I can actually take this piece of data that I have in my hard drive and send it to you over email, for example. Now, in order to prevent the double spend, what you do is you take that what I sent to you and immediately send it to the bank, to the server sometimes called the Mint. And the Mint issues you new tokens with the same amount immediately after and invalidating the one that you've sent there. So that way a transaction is complete. I send you money that I cannot double spend anymore. And now all this whole process is now done in a way that I cannot be identified. And the Mint doesn't know that an exchange between us took place. The Mint doesn't even know that the eCash it issued to me was redeemed later back by you. So, it cannot make the connection between issuing eCash, redeeming eCash, and it doesn't see where the eCash moves from A to B. So it's a perfectly private system where basically you have zero knowledge of what's happening except for how much you have issued so far. So that's what the Mint knows. Okay, so this is the story of how Ecash works. What does it have to do with Bitcoin? Now, in Bitcoin, we have many custodial applications today. One example is, for example, your stack and user account where you have a certain Satoshi balance. And those Satoshis, they are managed in this database format with the ledger, where plus me, minus you and so on. So it uses the classical ledger system. So it's a custodial system. What if we could build something like Stacker News, where the website stack news doesn't know who I am, how much I've paid into stack a news and whom I am up voting, for example. What if we could build that and with eCash, with eCash, we can do that. So, I sat down and coded up a lot of stuff in a very fast time, in a very short time, and made it work so that you can use eCash in exchange for Satoshi's on the Lightning Network. So basically, taking your Lightning node that is in your control, and then put this eCash Mint software on top of it and allow other users, now your users, for example, to use the funds on your Lightning node. So you're still the custodian of those funds, but use them in a way that is completely preserves of privacy. And this project is called Cashu. It's basically a Lightning wallet, custodial Lightning wallet where the mint, the person who manages the funds doesn't know who you are and transact with and so on. So in a sense, there's a very long way of saying that Ecash is a way to improve the privacy of any custodial system that is out there today. And of course, some people will think now, well, custodial systems are we should avoid them at all cost. And I would gladly agree with you if we could scale bitcoin to infinity today, we should do it. But turns out we can't. So there are just physical limitations on scaling bitcoin. These translate to physical limitations on scaling Lightning. As fast as Lightning is, we cannot open a channel for everyone right now, for example. This is just one of the limitations there. So I think the reality is that we will continue using custodial services. Now, my mission is to make the use of custodial services such that you can become the custodian for your own community. So, this is also what LNBits is trying to achieve, which is make it as simple as possible to become the custodian, the Uncle Jim for your, let's say, village, family or community or whatever. And so if you manage to do that, then adding Ecash on top of that mix is just strictly increasing improves the privacy of everyone participating in these systems. And that's where why I'm so fascinated by this topic topic because I see a great potential in upgrading many of the apps that we have today by basically transitioning from these classical ledger-based systems to a more private eCash-based systems that is built for software that runs on Bitcoin.
Kevin Rooke - 01:14:09:
That's really interesting. Do you expect to see any of the custodial providers today? I'm thinking like Wallet of Satoshi Cash App anyone who runs a custodial service today to integrate cashew or to use this instead of their classical ledger?
Calle - 01:14:27:
That is a very good question and I think they should, but we will see if it happens. I kind of think that as users, first of all, we have to also learn. So we've just starting to learn that an alternative is possible. And with that there will be more awareness about privacy. And just with increasing adoption of Bitcoin, there will be more awareness of privacy. At least that's my hope. So it is reasonable to assume that if this technology is available, then users will also demand from their service providers to use better technology to give them more privacy. So it could be that existing existing companies don't want to transition into another system. It could be that they have, I don't know, other issues, regulatory issues, or just that they are afraid to make a step in the direction I can see that. And for them I would say you should at least consider it and maybe you can also benefit from this. But I can definitely see new services popping up with this kind of software or system, especially those who are smaller and less capital intensive. So I can see tipping services just using privacy by default. I can see, for example, constructions like hosted channels where you randomly connect to a hosted channel provider to get liquidity on Lightning Network and so on. All these services could transition to an eCash model. And I think if the possibility is there, and especially if the software and the protocol itself is easy to implement, then it will also happen. That said, I don't expect a fiat system to appear on this on eCash again really that soon, because privacy is something that you will find in Bitcoin if you look for the correct of the right projects. But once you enable privacy in a fiat money system, then it's kind of game over for you. This is not deemed to be good behavior in the fiat world, so I wouldn't expect to see entities like Cash App or anything offer their services with this kind of system, although they could. And if you can find someone who does that, then use their service, because this is what David Chaum envisioned for our world back in the 90s. But again, it failed. And then all these very transparent and controlled systems like PayPal and so on sprung up and especially credit cards who are now dominating their fiat financial system.
Kevin Rooke - 01:17:34:
Do you think this also is a way then to scale the number of Bitcoin users in the world?
Calle - 01:17:38:
Yeah, absolutely. So custodial systems are definitely scaling the number of Bitcoin users. I'm very happy that you made this distinction there, because I don't think that it's the same thing as scaling bitcoin. I think scaling bitcoin is a technical term that should be reserved for developments in its protocol design and so on. But the number of Bitcoin users for sure is growing faster than if everyone would be self custodial. This is just very obvious. Just looking at exchanges itself, there are so many people who keep their bitcoin on exchanges. You should never do that, but even if you do, there is the possibility of doing that in a private manner. And so as long as this whole protocol of using Cashu and eCash is simple enough, I think it will also be implemented by people. And that could be an attraction by itself, just by promising your users that whatever they do on your platform, it will not be traced and not trackable, and there won't be any way to just to infringe on their privacy.
Kevin Rooke - 01:18:50:
Right, that makes sense. Okay, I want to jump into a segment I do at the end of every show. It's called the Lightning round. I got a few rapid fire questions for you. You ready?
Calle - 01:19:00:
All right? Yeah, I'm ready.
Kevin Rooke - 01:19:02:
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. Okay. Is there any book that has meaningfully changed your view of the world?
Calle - 01:19:49:
Yes. The little handbook by Epictet who is a stoicist.
Kevin Rooke - 01:19:55:
Interesting. How many people, human beings, do you think have made a Lightning Network transaction in the last 30 days?
Calle - 01:20:05:
That's a good one. Number of people? Let me think. I would guess on 250,000 people.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:13:
250,000 people in the last 30 days?
Calle - 01:20:16:
Yeah. Okay, I might be wrong.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:18:
Interesting. If you could change one thing about the Lightning Network, what would you change?
Calle - 01:20:25:
Backups. I would make it not scary to run a Lightning node by having L2 and Sighash. Any prevote.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:34:
Got it. If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be bitcoin, what asset would it be?
Calle - 01:20:43:
Not bitcoin. Then it's probably gold.
Kevin Rooke - 01:20:46:
Okay. And then finally, who is one bitcoin builder? Who you'd like to give a shout out to for the great work they're doing?
Calle - 01:20:55:
I want to give a shout out to Christian Decker. I'm a big fan of his work, and he's a humble, very scientific, very correct guy. And I'm just very thankful that we have people like him in the space.
Kevin Rooke - 01:21:08:
Awesome. Thank you so much for the time. Where can listeners go to learn more about you and your work?
Calle - 01:21:14:
You can find me Shit posting on Twitter under the handle @callebtc. C-A-L-L-E BTC.
Kevin Rooke - 01:21:23:
Perfect. Thank you again for the time, and I hope we can do it again soon.
Calle - 01:21:26:
Thank you very much. Kevin, thanks for having me.
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