Lightning & Identity, Olympus and Zap
Speakers: Jack Mallers
Date: October 29, 2019
Transcript By: Stephan Livera
Category: Podcast
Media: https://stephanlivera.com/download-episode/1599/120.mp3
podcast: https://stephanlivera.com/episode/120/
Stephan Livera: Jack, welcome to the show, man.
Jack Mallers: Stephan, thank you for having me. I’m a big fan.
Stephan Livera: I’m a big fan of you. I really like what your family’s doing, you know, Bitcoinmom and your dad @willbc20. I can’t remember his exact handle. And then obviously you guys are just killing it. I’m a big fan. Zap is my favorite wallet, so I really love using it and yeah, I’m really looking forward to just chatting with you about Zap and you know what you’re doing as well. I guess just also just context for the listeners. We are recording one day before the lightning conference, so we’re here together in Berlin. It’s October, 2019 so I’m really excited for the lightning conference. What are you looking forward to?
Jack Mallers: Oh man. Just being here, I think that Bitcoin moves so fast and can sometimes be so intense, but I think it was almost three years ago when I went into a Slack channel with Elizabeth and Laolu and a few others and we’re asking the stupidest questions and I don’t think anyone’s taken a deep breath and congratulated themselves for being here. I mean, what an amazing opportunity to be at this event. So I’m just happy to be invited and to be here, be part of something so big. It’s really cool.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, it’s an incredible lineup. It’s basically anyone who is anyone in lightning is here pretty much. I mean there’s very few exceptions to that. So really looking forward to that. So I wanted to talk to you about what you’re working on with Zap and Olympus and identity as well. I think that’s an interesting topic that we’re starting to see now a little bit more exploration around this idea of potentially using your lightning node as identity. So I suppose one thing there that we are used to as Bitcoiners when we open a channel with somebody, we ask, Hey, what’s your URI? What is your node pub key? Do you want to just take that? And what is that node pub key and could there be a relationship with identity?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. So believe it or not, this hasn’t really surfaced at the application level yet. And my tweet, which stirred some feathers, the good and the bad. But my intention was to let everyone know that identity is already used within lightning. So LND as you know, I’m not as familiar with the other implementations, but LND uses some form of identity via pub key already. If a node is acting strange, often offline, or not acting properly on the network and force closing channels, then it has some form of time off in bands within the network already. So even at the protocol level, we’re starting to see like a reputation system of sorts and it doesn’t use any personal information.
Jack Mallers: Right? That’s a really crazy concept, which may seem overly simple to some, but if you think about it is that your note is able to act on a reputation within the network with others and all they know is the public key, right? And well, how can that expand at the application level with a wallet like Zap? Why, why can’t we use the same concept? So the API as it stands today and some of the message signing can use a little bit of work and there’s various different ideas. But I think everyone is motivated to try and accomplish the same thing at the protocol level reputation system is very, very important to ensure that your peer doesn’t get into any nasty relationships with bullies on the network. Right. And the same goes at the application layer. There’s no reason I can’t sign up for a service or autopay with a merchant I’m frequent with and we can kind of do a handshake with signatures without giving any personal information or anything like that.
Jack Mallers: So this is kind of the basic idea. I think we have a lot of work to go, my tweet wasn’t saying it’d be ready tomorrow, but yeah, I think it was received well. And I think usually with Zap my goal is to just make ideas very relatable and intuitive and then other people smarter than me pick them up and we do them together.
Stephan Livera: Right. And they work out these little details. Right. So I guess just thinking out loud, one thing could be that you might have one node for the family. You might not necessarily have one LND per person. So do you have any thoughts on how to get around that?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, well you’d have to think that like your public key is an a a person of itself. Okay. So I wouldn’t try and treat it as if, you know, I’m one person with three nodes. So how do I get my three nodes to represent me? That’s really tough. You’d have to tie some personal identity somewhere, right? I mean if you want it in its most pure form, you know, this public key represents an identity within its own. It has its own relationship on the network, it has its own liquidity and its own at the application level, relationship with other services and authentication. I don’t know if Lapps.co launch something so I don’t, I don’t know exactly how it will work or excuse me, execution wise at the application layer there’s a lot of testing and such to do and there is like a trust model that we can kind of play with it. It’s not very binary. You can kind of tug the string a little to the left or a little to the right. And we could tie like an email address to an array of public keys if you wanted to.
Jack Mallers: Right. I mean would that be compromising too much personal identity? Can you have just a throwaway email that just is responsible for identifying multiple nodes with each other? Probably. Will consumers react well to that? I don’t know. What’s the only way to see? Try it. So it’s unclear, but there’s a lot of exploration and I try not to fit the mental model that has been for the last, 50 years on the internet and try and approach it really new and fresh.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. And that’s, that’s really the power of Bitcoin and lightning that we can try some things in a totally new way. And one example would be currently right now if you try to buy something online with a standard credit card, you pretty much have to give name, phone number, address, all this information. But now in a digital world with Bitcoin and lightning payment, we can change that. So what are some of the benefits that you would see of using lightning pub keys as identifies as opposed to the traditional way?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, well I would say I think one of the more successful reputation systems maybe ever is Amazon potentially, or these types of reputation systems where I can look for products and be confident in the general public of being really bright. And I think one of the best most interesting features with Zap right now is this feature of auto pay potentially. So Zap desktop runs on your machine, your keys are on your machine. And why can’t I identify a node public key like yalls and say, I know this public key. I trust this public key. I use Alex Bosworth’s service all the time. You know, what Zap, if I’m going to be making a payment with this public key or or such, right.
Jack Mallers: I would like to say that you can pay it without my confirmation because I know that public key, I trust that public key. I trust that merchant. And as long as the invoice is not over a thousand Satoshis and it’s this public key and I would really appreciate it if you would just blow through that paywall for me and it can reduce that type of friction and enhance the user experience a ton. So like you said, I mean the process of credit cards and personal information online, the time cost and mental costs of onboarding yourself to various websites where I think we can reduce a lot of the friction and cute little user stories like that I think can go a long way. So we’ll see.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, that’s really cool to think about. How about, okay, so there’s webLN and this is idea, I think Will O’Beirne’s application Joule, which has, I think he’s trying to work towards a similar kind of idea of autopay up to this amount. And so I suppose there might be some way to interact there together.
Jack Mallers: Yeah, webLN, there’s LN URL. Yeah. There’s this idea of just some protocol of transferring information between services or peers. And yeah, I think it is really important though to understand that lightning, your public key is your unique identifier. It is how you, it is your social security number, right? And so that’s really, really cool and we can identify others and yeah, it makes me feel better that smart people are thinking of it the same way. Right. I think it’s only a matter of time at this point.
Stephan Livera: Right? Yeah. Okay. And then one thing now though is we do have to think about backup and recovery and that sort of thing, right? So if you lose your lightning pub key somehow, or if you, let’s say you, you didn’t back up your, your seed and you know, then now is that a problem where you’ve lost your identity so to speak?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, I think I was Adam Back maybe that replied to my tweet and said, there’s much better ways to do this if we assume that people won’t lose things. Right? I mean, so you have your LND seed, which, which will recover. But sure. I don’t think that you should tie this to passport verification so that you don’t have to bring your passport from home. I think there’s a lot of work to do, but for small micropayments and relationships with other services and really big UX wins, I don’t see why not. If, I’m using my Zap wallet and auto paying micropayments as I browse through the web and Zap’s kind of handling all that experience for me in the background and I lose my wallet, tough, brush it off and get a new one.
Stephan Livera: Right, not a big deal. The same relationships again. Yeah. and then I’ve seen now Rui Gomes who works at Open Node and also working on Lapps.co, I forgot the exact URL. I think it’s Lapps.co.
Jack Mallers: Yeah sounds right.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. And one thing he was trying to do is experimenting with a similar idea and basically I think you pay a one set invoice and that proves that you have a certain identity within the lightning network. I guess firstly, did you have any thoughts on that as a model of identity with lightning?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, I saw that. I love the Open Node guys. They were early Zap contributors, not really himself. But the founders the code is an open source and I’m not entirely sure that anyone’s walked through exactly how it works, but as far as I’m concerned, you pay you, all you have to do is paste an invoice. So no one’s actually paying it and it transfers enough information. But yeah, I think the general, the good news is that everyone is, is understanding this idea and is interested in tackling it and sees the value in it. So there’s probably various approaches and they’re all going to be really cool. But yeah, I’m not totally sure if he’s listening. I would love to see the coder or an explanation or such. Cause maybe it’s much brighter than my idea. Right? I don’t know.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. Maybe. And I guess the other thing as well to think about is custodial. And I know most people have thoughts about custodial. And then we would have to consider what’s the identity going to look like for a person who is using a custodial lightning wallet and potentially on the bright side, that’s an incentive to run your own full node and so on.
Jack Mallers: Yeah. This is the biggest point that, and sometimes I get very aggressive with my opinions, but here’s the thing. I think that custodial services will always play a role and that choices are very important. But if we were to assume that custodial was okay, we went to built lightning. Lightning is designed with the assumption that this is a peer to peer and with identity that’s magnified, right? If your custodial service is acting in a way it is representing all of its users on the network with this identity. So you wouldn’t be able to log in, right with the custodial service you’d have the same account as everyone else. I wouldn’t be able to, you know, with a merchant be able to set, for example, if we stay on the topic of Open Node, Open Node’s merchants, all same share the same public key.
Jack Mallers: So for Zap to allow a user to have like some auto pay feature with an open node, right? Like I can’t have that because there could be one service that’s amazing that the user uses frequently and that they trust, but another service that if you go to by happens chance, they’re just like maybe stealing your money, you’re acting maliciously. So I think it is an incentive and I think as time goes on, we’ll start to see a lot of these things play out and really disincentivize custodial services. And I think that non-custodial isn’t, won’t be eventually too worse off of user experience. I really don’t. I think it just takes time and there’s more work for noncustodial services. And that people’s time preference when it comes to lightning. Right? It’s very different than, than the HODLer mentality. People want to do it now and they want to tweet their screencast now and they want to be part of the lightning torch now.
Jack Mallers: So custodial services play a great part, but of my opinion as things play out, I think it’ll start to show.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. Right. And I think it’s a tough one to discuss because there’s so many different complicating factors. It’s easy. And many of us who first came in when I was a newbie, I didn’t understand these things. I didn’t know that I meant to run my, I meant to run my own full node back in like 2013 and stuff. But then it’s about how can you allow people to have that space to learn better? And some people might have the view that you should just onboard directly into the full node experience and that you should you know, maybe buy one of these, a node in a box type things, you know, the nodl or a Casa node or whatever. And then you know, be onboarded immediately into the fully, you know, silver and experience if you will, the non, the noncustodial view. So then how does that play into what you’re doing with Zap and how you’re trying to drive certain behaviors there?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, so Zap was always about trying to usher in this new era. So I’ve always been of the opinion that lightning gives us a totally new era. Like the BC type, right? Like with lightning, we get a fresh start at establishing a relationship with the user. If you think of the last decade, Bitcoin’s relationship with the end consumer is like grade F minus, right? It’s really complicated. It’s for drug dealers, it’s for terrorists. It’s illegal. Taxes are crazy. It’s for nerds. You have to be smart and it’s really intimidating. And lightning allows us a brand new, fresh start. And a relationship with these users in Zap was always about for the community by the community. It was announced in the midst of the scaling debate and it was not mine, it was ours and it was going to represent our principles as a community and do our best to enhance the user experience and represent us to general consumers in mainstream audience in the right way.
Jack Mallers: So yeah, Zap is non-custodial. It always will be. And I think those values are extremely important. And services like Coinbase, will always have users. That’s just a fact of markets, right? When there’s two decisions someone will always make one that you don’t, but yeah, I think so far so good with Zap and that’s the stance that we’ve decided to take for our entire lifespan. Right?
Stephan Livera: Yeah. So I guess let’s just talk a little bit about the possible ways you can use Zap because there’s a lot of different ways, right? You can have the desktop zap, you can connect it through to your own full node. So, for example, if you’re running a nodl or some, some other node device, you can connect it through that way. What else? Some of the other permutations if you will?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. So you can get on lightning and make payments within minutes without any other external services. So Zap comes with a lightning node inside, it uses neutrino, the famed neutrino from lightning labs. Yeah, we’ll have tor support soon. Obviously Olympus is a really big deal and yeah, I think with Zap we never have too big of a roadmap. I know that there’s different flavors of ice cream for every hungry person, but for us we’re just very reactionary to the community. We’re available in response. Like what I like to say is the best. Next feature is the one that is told to you, right. So whatever users really want we have open resource repository and we collect issues and we build. But yeah, you can connect to your remote node, you can run a node on your phone, on your laptop soon tor and yeah, that’s awesome. Serviceable. Yeah.
Stephan Livera: That’s awesome. And yeah, the mobile app is really very nice user interface as well. So I’ve, I’ve noticed that I’ve had a little bit of difficulties getting into my own home node cause I can’t get the tor part working yet. But I’ve found it a really good experience overall and looking forward to tor support as well.
Jack Mallers: Yeah. Yeah. We got a lot going on, but soon come soon. Come with time. I appreciate the kind words by the way. Thank you.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, no, it’s a really cool app. I really enjoy it. Let’s talk a little bit about how the onboarding can be made easier as well. Right? So the typical journey for somebody, I guess for people like us who’ve been around in Bitcoin, you had to learn about Bitcoin first and then learn lightning. But now with lightning, there are opportunities to onboard directly into lightning. Did you want to touch on that?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. I don’t think that a user should be required to really interface with the chain. The Bitcoin blockchain. I think that lightning will end up introducing like a brand new economy of sorts in my opinion. And a user can only interface with these micro-payments and have these small balances and continuously top up. And I think that user experience is extremely preferable and there’s a lot of hacks at the protocol that we can implement to kind of obfuscate and, and present a much cleaner narrowed down experience for the user. So things like Olympus I think are really important. And yeah, I think with zaps we’ll start to see a lot of really clever onboarding tricks that we’ll do. I mean, you can even think of a world where the user doesn’t even know that they’re buying Bitcoin.
Jack Mallers: Where I could say, you know, Fold gives 20% off. If you scan the lightning QR code and you only have your debit card and fold can present an interface, you know, where if you purchase these tokens right now and swipe your card, then you get 20% off. And what’s really happening is we’re using lightning at the lower level for efficient and instant settlement of fiscal value. And I gave this talk in San Francisco where if money is a technology, lightning is a serious innovation in settlement and clearing in money period, not just Bitcoin. The fact that you can clear physical value in seconds, right? Who’s clearing that? Right? Is there a clearing house? Is there a federal reserve check system? No, it was node 03AC and it instantly cleared in HTLC and physically settled value. So the applications of that I think are very wide ranging and people haven’t really grasped them yet.
Jack Mallers: I think a lot of these lapps right now are really cool. But yeah, I mean that ability and what you can do with the infrastructure, I mean we can even get it to a point where a user doesn’t even know lightning is, is helping settle physical value where traditionally settling in is tough. Maybe cross borders right? Or online commerce. So, so yeah.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. Okay. Then I guess let’s talk through that journey a little bit. For a user who is first starting to use lightning they would have to always deal with, and this is the famed inbound liquidity problem, right? Because I’ve had that before where I tried to teach somebody and they would, they would say, Oh, I set up the thing but I couldn’t receive. And I’m like, Oh yeah, inbound liquidity. And then you gotta you gotta teach that. And so what are some of the ways you are thinking of getting around that or speeding through that?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. Yeah. So I think there are two really inherent, bigger problems that people are anticipating with lightning is one, this inbound liquidity onboarding issue. And then the other is the fact that we all use the blockchain and I can get into that, but it actually I think is a bigger problem than people are anticipating. And I know that that was very high level, but we can get into it. So for the inbound liquidity right now with Zap, it’s definitely a problem. New users to Zap are almost always like a send only until they have this right. And soon in our upcoming releases you’ll be able to buy incoming capacity. You’ll be able to onboard via turbo channels and which will match, you know, you put up $50 on your side, the service will match $50 on the other side.
Jack Mallers: Even with Olympus, I think with consumers, smaller level consumers, it’s much easier because what I can do with something like Olympus is I can say, okay, you are onboarded and you are what’s considered a customer. You’re a user of the service. And I can do some statistics on how much you’re generally worth. And then I can say, okay, you buy $50 worth Bitcoin, I’ll toss 25 on the other side, or I’ll match your $50 on the other side. And I think onboarding through that way we’ll will be likely. But it is generally a pretty big problem. I mean, even with things like wumbo channels in institution. So Zap, think with Olympus I like to consider it as a market innovation rather than a lightning innovation. There isn’t a lot of clever lightning protocol engineering going on. I mean the turbo stuff is cool, but it’s actually tying in into the deep liquidity pool that Bitcoin, the industry has developed.
Jack Mallers: But that liquidity pool has been more or less designed for institutions. It’s much deeper liquidity like OTC desk, minimum order size is traditionally 250 grand. Right? And tying into that deeper liquidity pool with partnerships with people like CMT and then streaming and getting that liquidity to the consumer and using lightning. So I think, you know, we’ll have Wumbo relationships with these bigger institutions like CMT, like a Cumberland and I think liquidity there and managing that we’ll need to do things like submarine swaps and more advanced rebalancing tools. But for the consumer, I think like Breez is an example of some growth hacks where you can kind of front capital costs. But I think that those have a lifespan and a timeline and, and I don’t think they scale infinitely and I consider it largely an unsolved problem. So with Olympus, we’ll be trying this turbo stuff, which I think is extremely helpful.
Jack Mallers: And there are trust tradeoffs. For example, you can receive with turbo, it is much more trusted, but you can always wait for more confirmations and allow the user to kind of pick their own trust model. And I think we’ll see some serious innovation there. But that and the fact that we all use the blockchain and we have some very deep inherent exposure financially to using the blockchain. And I think those two problems with lightning businesses are very apparent to me and very much unsolved.
Stephan Livera: Right? Yeah.
Jack Mallers: I’m interested in trying to solve them because, okay.
Stephan Livera: So I think Breez is a good example because just for listeners who aren’t aware breeze is a mobile lightning app. And basically once you set that up, Breez technology actually open, I think it’s a 1 million sat channel with you. And so you have incoming liquidity from the get go, but from a business model point of view, that is committing a UTXO in your direction. And if you’re not making that worthwhile for Breez, then it might not make as much sense from a business model case. But Jack as you were saying with Zap, I think it’s a slightly different model where you would try to think about what is the customer LTV let’s say, and what can I afford to, how much can I lock up or commit in the direction of that customer. And presumably the idea is to have a longer term relationship with that customer and then make it back through other routes. Either routing fees or put deals in front of their face so that they can, you clip the ticket on the commission, that sort of thing. That’s essentially what you’re talking about.
Jack Mallers: Yeah, exactly. So if we look at the problem super practically. Okay, so one, the problem with opening channels directly to a new user, is that the time preference or should I say block preference of getting that channel confirmed is it has to be now, right? The user can’t be waiting six hours. That fee that you set has to be a fee that you’re confident will be confirmed in the next block or two. And that’s really expensive. So one of the ways that Zap solves this with turbo channels is with turbo channels you can start to spend right away and the incentives and game theory is very much in your favor. And so that the channels that we opened via turbo don’t have that same time preference, right? Is that we can set, you know, a one sat, two sat, three sat per byte fee and be confident that users can start using lightning and using the service before confirmation.
Jack Mallers: And so we saved drastically compared to what would be maybe like a 75 sat per byte fee to get into the next block. So okay. Very on a practical level, turbo solves that problem kind of. Right? It is a huge gain. The second is you obviously have this issue of not all users are the same. You have users that use the product a lot. You have users that download and never use it again. And there’s a capital cost of tying up liquidity. And so practically how would we solve that? Well, in a perfect world, every user that downloads a wallet can interview with us and I can get to know them and understand how they’re best going to use it right now in reality, that’s not a thing. Right? so what are some of the things that we can do? Well, if you do onboard and you buy Bitcoin, right, or, or you’re depositing in into a wallet for a turbo channel, well then I kind of know enough about you.
Jack Mallers: I know enough that you are a customer, you are a user, you are stacking sats, you’re likely to stack again. And I can start to understand more and make more informed decisions so that the capital commitment isn’t so null in the brain and it’s just on download. We go, I can learn more. So learning a little bit to make more advanced decisions and tweaking the protocol a little bit to save on fees, which again, this idea that we have this inherent exposure to the Bitcoin blockchain as lightning developers to open and close channels that costs money. And I think this is, I talk about it tomorrow in my talk. I think it is an underrated, huge deal and huge problem and I don’t think anyone really understands the problem enough to solve it. And so yeah, those are kind of the insights of some of the design of Olympus and why I made some decisions I made. Hopefully that makes sense.
Stephan Livera: I think it does make a lot of sense because yeah, I think your explanation around being able to use a one set per byte fee as opposed to paying 75 or more, let’s say a bull run comes, you know, there’s a lot of congestion on Bitcoin’s blockchain and therefore you can’t just get through with one sat per byte that’ll start to play into that. And isn’t there also a thing where if it doesn’t get confirmed, I think is within two weeks. Like if you put out a one sat per byte and let’s say there’s a block space market and it actually never confirmed, then you’re in even bigger trouble. Right?
Jack Mallers: Right. Yeah. Especially with turbo, right. The assumption is that the channel does eventually confirm. Right. so we have some advanced logic on our end to, to make sure that that happens. But yeah, I think an interesting point I would, I would try and convey here is, what I’ll talk about tomorrow at the conference is that block space within itself is almost a commodity. What I mean by that is a block has defined characteristics. And it’s scarce in its own way, in the same way that gold is almost right. So a block has this one megabyte, right, or four megabyte with SegWit. And you have to find a hash below a given target for it to be valid. So what I can’t do is be like, man, this is full. I can’t afford to open the channel for a user. So someone download AWS and get another block, it’s like no, that’s not a block though. Right? So block space and getting into the blockchain is scarce within its own way.
Jack Mallers: Right? So if that’s true in instead of thinking paying for a fee, we’re actually bidding for block space, then you think of it more as a market. Okay. And if it is a market, then let’s think of it. I mean in a more practical way, are we in a bull run? Are we in a bear market of block space? Right? Am I bullish and my bearish and my huddling? Right? And if you think about that, well what am I as a market participant? I’m a frequent buyer of block space. I’m on the bid side. Okay. And as a business, I am inherently short this commodity block space, all that means inherently short. All that means is that if block space goes up, I’m not happy. My general position is I’m a constant buyer and assuming that the price won’t run away from me to the upside because if we go through some giant fee spike, my business is going to hurt, right?
Jack Mallers: Let’s say that I have an operational costs of thousands of channels a week and I’m assuming I can spend a couple grand on channels and if we go from generally $1 or less fees to $50 my business is going to get blown out. Okay. and in any market that’s free of volatility is a fact. Okay. So I think that businesses on lightning will soon understand as the block reward grinds its way to zero and fees become more important that we are inherently short something that as a bitcoiner we’re naturally long, I believe that Bitcoin has a fixed supply, 21 million cap and that fees are important. So here I am as a business inherently short. This thing that I believe should go up and it’s a huge problem, but market participants, a lot of us in businesses have economic exposure.
Jack Mallers: Like a corn farmer, inherently long corn. If the price of corn goes down while they’re growing, then they’re down. So what we’ve done traditionally in human history is we build derivative products, we build futures. And so what I would like to see is if I’m a lightning business and I have an inherent short exposure to this fee market that I would be able to hedge my exposure via a future. And if I’m inherently short, who is inherently long, who’s the other side of the trade, a miner is inherently long. Block rewards are going down and fees are vastly important and getting more and more important through every having. So I can basically say I’d like to long Bitcoin fees cause if Bitcoin fees crushed to the upside and my operating costs of a lightning business to open channels goes from a couple thousand dollars a week to $50,000 a week.
Jack Mallers: And there’s nothing I can do about that. I would like to have a long future position on fees to help me cover the cost cause I’ll be losing out of my pocket, but I’ll be making money on the futures position and as a miner, right? If fees are going, it kept low with innovations like SegWit and block rewards are getting less and less than difficulties going up. I would like to have a short fee position where fees stay low below the cost of my break even at least I make money on my short position. And that way we have an efficient hedging market and I think it’s really important or else lightning businesses are going to have this balance sheet exposure and you can see like maybe people like Coinbase, I mean God knows how many how much money they are spending on paying withdrawals for their users, right?
Jack Mallers: Not batching transactions. It’s not just lightning businesses. Every Bitcoin business that uses the blockchain has this inherent economic exposure and maybe you can see a lot of the insights of why they supported something like SegWit2X, why their time preference was what it was. Right? And so I think this problem and it may take a futures market to solve as opposed to some technical innovation. So I think that’s super interesting. And in a bigger problem that people think, but as a lightning business, and I’m going to be opening channels as a service very soon or I already am now in a beta it’s a problem and my balance sheet is really exposed. If Roger Ver were to clog the chain my pockets would start to drain. Right?
Stephan Livera: Yeah. That was a fantastic explanation. I love that. So talking through that example where Bitcoin and particularly lightning businesses are, they don’t want the block space market to become more expensive obviously, but they believe it will. And then on the other side, the miners, who are the, the other side of that trade, how could such a trade be executed to, is it some kind of forward arrangements? But then how would the miner deliver on that? It would basically be saying, “Oh, Jack, I already took some money from you and now you want to confirm all these transactions actually at a lower fee than what the prevailing block space market is. But because I’m a miner and I agreed that in advance, I’m going to honor that arrangement. Or what would it look like?”
Jack Mallers: Right? Yeah. It would be more of a traditional future or a swap. So there would be some, some deliverable. So it’d be like a two week settlement or so. So I can hedge myself out for a few weeks worth of fees or whatever timeframe makes sense. And so what’s important to note is I’ve given same type of talk and idea and I’m a market maker on difficulty right now. Actually, I work with it on CMT. And so miners have this exposure to difficulty. That’s really tough if I buy hardware that immediately loses value as soon as I buy it, right? Because hardware is always improving. So the top of the market lasts at the top of the market for a week or so before there’s a new cooler way. And difficulty is continually running up. My production output of Bitcoins is less and less. Now the issue, so right, like minors are inherently short difficulty, right?
Jack Mallers: The issue with that market is there is no natural long have difficulty. So making a market there is really tough. It’s more of an insurance product is I’m just kind of taking the other side where miners will lose a lot of that trade because there is no natural long. So this is more market talk but when there is no natural two sided market, the market that the maker can make is really wide. But with the natural two sided market, like Bitcoin businesses are inherently short fees, miners are inherently long fees because you can cross those exposures than a market maker. It would be very, very simple. So you can see a futures contract listed on a traditional exchange. I don’t think it needs to be centralized by any means, but you can just deposit Bitcoin to an exchange and enter a contract where I say my operating cost to open channels with Olympus is X and I know how much users are worth and how much money I’m making.
Jack Mallers: So let’s say my spread for simplicity sake of profit is $10. I’d be happy to use two of of that $10 and put it into in a futures trade to hedge myself right nowif my futures trade doesn’t hit, that means that fees aren’t running to the upside and I lose 10 and I only profit eight but I’m very much protected from when they do run to the upside. I’m not going to go out of business. And it’s, and it’s just a very traditional, just like, you know, BitMex future, the CME future. But it’s more tied into the economics of Bitcoin and it isn’t just like a spot future like we’ve seen in traditional capital markets. A little bit of a market speak, but.
Stephan Livera: hat was fascinating. Yeah. The other thing that was really fascinating because I think a lot of Bitcoiners are coming at it more from the technical perspective. And so they’re thinking more of technical innovations rather than the actual financial components that, that required for it. One thing I was interested to also discuss, and this is more maybe more on the technical side, but it might be that as we hit a new bull bull market, then fees on chain will rise and so on. But then we might see other innovations coming that help. So a quick example would be Alex Bosworth and the team at Lightning Labs with submarine swaps. But then they’ve got loop in and loop out. And then the next level of that is Hyperloop, which is this idea of, you know, just for example’s sake, you could do one on chain transaction to pay and then receive it back into say five different channels and refill five different channels. So there’s a massive, you can see there’s a lot of batching potential in that. And so how would that impact, the business model for some of these lightning wallets or companies?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, it would help a lot obviously. So if you look traditionally in the history of Bitcoin, we’ve already seen similar technical innovations that we’ll probably see in lightning, like SegWit, like batching. I mean a business like Coinbase, had this direct exposure. The exposure is much less because a lot of the innovation that’s gone on on the first layer and we’ll see the same type of thing. But fees, the design of the system is that fees are going to go up. I was trying to explain to some of my relatives, like I have this balance sheet exposure in my business and it’s really tough. They’re like, okay, well what is the exposure? How much is it? And I was like, the tricky thing is, I don’t know.
Jack Mallers: I don’t know. Some days it’s a dollar, some days it’s $50 and it’s very volatile because it’s a free market. So just the fact that there is inherent volatility and the fact that the system is designed to push the price of my exposure up very quickly. So, yeah, I think, I think the technical innovation will always play a part, and that is what a miner would be afraid of. Right? So it’s very clear what I’m afraid of. I’m afraid that I wouldn’t say afraid, but my exposure as a business is that the block reward is going to go to zero and fees are going to go up in my cost to run. My business is going to go much higher than it is today. Right? And fast and sometimes, like for example, it could be tomorrow fees may spike 50X. Okay.
Jack Mallers: But as a miner, what would I be scared of? I would be scared that the smartest engineers in the world are working on Bitcoin and they’re going to suppress fees as much as I can. And as blaock reward grinds its way to zero in difficulty skyrocketing my opportunity to get coins, right? Like if fees continue to stay this low, I’m going to start going out of business. Right? And so now you have this, what’s so important is that we have this two sided market of exposure. So I think technical innovation will be extremely important. And this is what a miner is scared of. Like for example, SegWit a lot of miners weren’t fans, right? And so you have this type of dual-sided market. It’s very natural. So yeah, all of that will play a part. We’ve already seen it traditionally in Bitcoin’s history at the first layer and at the second layer. I’m sure we’ll see a repeat.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that’s really fascinating to think about though. I think, it’s really interesting and you articulated it very nicely. I’m also keen to talk about Zap as a wallet and I guess also with taking on lightning and some people being onboarded directly into lightning, do you have any thoughts around support for hardware wallets and cold storage? Right. So let’s say somebody gets onboarded only into the lightning network and then they want to start stacking sats and let’s say the amount of their stacking starts to get close to the channel limit that they’ve got. I mean at that point you’ve either got to open another channel to that customer or that customer needs to start finding ways that they can push it away into cold storage. And maybe a submarine swap is one way to do that. But what, what are your thoughts there?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, there was a user on Twitter that had similar thoughts and as there’s nothing stopping us from integrating with hardware wallets and allowing you to buy $1,000 worth of Bitcoin on Olympus, loop out $900 of them and then spend the other hundred on lighting and that loop out can go straight to your, your cold card. Right? there’s nothing stopping that. And I think multiple channels won’t be such a hindrance soon with things like AMP. Right? So, yeah, I’d be the first to admit that I have pretty much nothing figured out, right? I’m very much a learner of the times. So we’ll see. Right if I have a user, doesn’t have enough receive capacity with their current channel state and I need to give them Bitcoins while I need to open a new turbo channel. And that’s just the fact of the matter or I can deliver it on chain or such. Right. But yeah, I think summary in swaps will be a huge deal. Hyperloop will be really cool. And I mean opening new channels and using amp and leveraging the fact that a channel liquidity is much more diverse and accessible to make payments I think will be a big deal too. So we’ll see is my answer.
Speaker 2: It’s just interesting to hear some of that discussion. And what are some potential responses? And I think maybe on a slightly related topic is in Bitcoin right now, the typical Bitcoiner they’re running multiple different wallets, right? They might have a Coldcard, they might have a Trezor or a Ledger, you know, like that’s on the hardware side. And then they might have some phone wallets that they’re using and then they might have a lightning wallet that they’re using that doesn’t, you know. And so then one example I’m thinking here is something like Electrum, which it might become more like a big monolith, right? Because if it, a lot of people are using it for their hardware wallet and it’s coming out with lightning. Now, I don’t know the details on their lightning aspect of it, but how do you think about that with Zap and you know, playing in that ecosystem of having multiple tools, do you think it makes more sense for someone to have one app that just does everything or is it more from your perspective that’s more of an attack surface that’s more of a confusion for the user? We want to keep it simple. What are your views there?
Jack Mallers: I have some opinions, but I’m not sure that they matter. Right. I think markets are super efficient and time is the ultimate truth teller. So there’s a lot of products and wallets. The fact of the matter is they cost money to operate, they cost money to run, and it’s required that people use them. And I think over time we’ll start to see what users really value. And then I’m not saying that in a way that, you know, some people’s businesses are gonna die or whatever, but it’s just a fact. Right? It’s just a fact. And I think that lightning is super new and we know nothing about the landscape of users, the type of demand and how people using lightning relate to Bitcoin. Bitcoin traditionally as a savings technology and we don’t really understand how people want to use lightning, why it’s valuable today to them.
Jack Mallers: Is privacy more valuable than the fact that you can make micropayments? I have no idea. Right? And so I think just trying things and there’s a lot of people that are giving users a lot of exposure and we’ll just start to see. My assumption is that having a hundred wallets is not the best. And I think everyone would agree with me there. So we’ll probably start to see the market consolidate a little bit. But who knows, I have my opinions, but I really think that they’re not relevant. The only honest answer and the best answer is going to come from the consumers in the market. And, and time will tell that.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, no, that’s it. Yeah. Fair points there. Especially with things like even like with multisignature, right? So even now there’s, you know, there’s Electrum you could use there are service providers, you can use then that those wallets might be very distinct and then you might have one that’s really designed to be like a cold storage wallet and then you’ve got one that’s more like a day to day and maybe Zap would be like a day to day wallet that you, you know, you’ve got your mobile app and it pairs back with your node back home.
Jack Mallers: I think with lightning there’s a lot of inherent speculation as a business because of the fact that we know nothing about the consumer and how people value this technology, their relationship with Bitcoin and why they think it’s important. If I knew all of those things, I could build the best product today. Right. But I don’t, and no one does. And even the consumer, I’m sure you don’t, right? Like no one, no one really understands. So with Zap we always try and be, like I said before, available in response so you can connect to your remote node, any hardware wallet that’s willing to integrate. We have like one line of code integration LND connect thing and it’s really simple. We have nodes within the application so consumers don’t want to have, you know, the phone in your pocket and node runs on your device and it’s really simple, right?
Jack Mallers: And if something, if some onboarding or some hardware or something takes off and we get a better understanding, is Zap in a perfect position to adapt there? And same with Olympus. Olympus is in a system that’s baked into our wallet itself. It’s like a standalone component that’s really good at the hard parts of managing market risk and onboarding users and streaming quotes and building these turbo things. And in some of these protocol things to help us with the user experience, but it can work with whoever, right? Any lightning business can use it and it’s very flexible. So I try not to, show any cards right with my hand with lightning because it’s way too early. Right? And so with Zap. Who knows where lightning will be in 12 months for all I know it’s a privacy tool. And people don’t care to make micropayments they just care to make payments in a very private matter.
Jack Mallers: And that the way I designed Zap and the way I think about it would totally change. So we try and just stay really open, and only build things that we know are valuable regardless of the use case, I guess in very kind of kind of tamed at the moment.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, that’s a really interesting, and then that also brings to mind this idea of lightning service providers. Now I think Roy Sheinfeld does spoken about this and it’s like what sort of businesses will exist in this lightning economy? Will there be channels as you know, the channels as a service idea as well? And then trying to be the person who manages all that liquidity for the co for the end consumer because the end consumer is not going to care about, Oh, how do I do my channel management, blah, blah, blah. Right. Yeah.
Jack Mallers: So you can think of Olympus as an quote unquote LSP I guess. Yeah. Again, I think it’s super unclear. So I, yeah, I think Bitrefill, Breez, Olympus. I mean all of these things are underground services that are meant to build a better user experience for people building on top of lightning, from a super high level. And yeah, I’m sure. I think that there’ll be very important, a lot of the economics though are super unclear. Like whether they’re profitable and whether people care enough, whether they work. I mean you can think also of “Oh you opened turbo channels for people and manage liquidity and you charge X, well I can just do it myself and maybe a part of the lightning business is you have to have your own type of channel management underground because it’s just cheaper to do it yourself. I mean, what is the cost of being an expert in open source software?
Jack Mallers: That value proposition probably doesn’t last very long cause I can download the code and do it myself. So I think markets will be super efficient and we’ll learn a lot. So I’m very much admitting to having none of this figured out. And I think what’s most important is just being a good listener and being a good observer.
Stephan Livera: Yeah. And so related to being a lightning service provider is this concept of routing phase and in a channel phase. What’s your thoughts there in terms of how should we think about them and what are some good, I guess part of, in my mind, I’m just thinking of that recent email that Rusty sent to the mailing list saying, Hey, we should raise the default routing fee. So how are you thinking about routing fees? Should people be manually amending them and, you know, how should they think about that?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. Routing fees and in the routing market within lightning is a perfect example of just how early this industry is. So even my routing node, for example, just runs the default. Okay and the issue is I’m not economically accounting for the fact that I’ll have, you know, channel closing expenses and such. And so I don’t think that there are going to be businesses that can rely on routing to be profitable. I think that the market is just far too efficient. You can run LND on a laptop or on a Raspberry Pi and just undercut any, amazing Coinbase like Bitcoin bank. Right? And so I don’t, I don’t foresee that as a revenue generator. But I certainly think that the fee market is a perfect example of right now this is a hobbyist market. A lot of Zaps users are not users because we offer some amazing service that they couldn’t do before with, without Fiat or, right?
Jack Mallers: It’s because everyone is a HODLer and everyone wants Bitcoin to succeed and they’re here to help and they think lightning is a candidate to make their investment go up and they want to support it. And so it’s very much a hobbyist market and a lot of us aren’t acting economically and understanding our balance sheet exposure. Like, I shouldn’t have my routing fees set to what they are because I’m not making money with the fact that I’m paying for channel closes that any, any channel partner can make me lose money at any point. Right. And, and then also, obviously you have the balance sheet exposure of opening the channels in this futures market. So I think as the industry matures, and that’s why I want to talk about this at the lightning conference, is if businesses are going to act, you’ll start to see more efficient economics there.
Jack Mallers: So I think the fee market is a perfect example that this is very much hobbyist, right?
Stephan Livera: And it’s not arms length, right? It’s like, Oh Hey, I’m opening a node. Can you can, can we just swap channels kind of thing. But in the future that might be more of like an arms length decision of, Hey, is it gonna make dollars and cents for me to open this channel and commit UTXOs in your direction and put myself at risk, hot wallet and risk and so on.
Jack Mallers: Yeah, exactly. I think another perfect example is we used to have this fallacy. We as in a lot of the lightning community of dual funded channels where it’s like, you know, opening a channel then looping out to have receive capacity. This is a tough user experience. How about I put up 0.1 BTC, you put up 0.1 BTC?
Jack Mallers: Yup. Now as we’ve grown and we all are running lightning businesses or lightning services, that’s actually not a great idea because someone can basically spam my channel and dry up liquidity by just drawing away Bitcoins from my wallet. And then when a service like Olympus wants to deliver channels, it’s out of liquidity, right? So I don’t want no, you want 0.1 BTC of my liquidity. No, I don’t, I don’t want that type of vulnerability. So I think as a, we have this economic exposure market, the market will be generally much more efficient and we’ll start to see some serious innovation that’s required because you know, businesses have balance sheets and businesses need to operate in a profit manner. And economic human incentive is probably the most powerful one in human history. And, and right now, in lightning it’s hobbyist, like I said before, but I think very quickly it won’t be. And you know, people are taking in venture capital money and people are operating much more economically than then yeah. Downloading LND in tweeting about it.
Stephan Livera: “Hey, open a channel with me guys!” Nah, but one example and to to your point, I think it’s real relevant is this concept of channel acceptance policy, right? So right now for example, I know a bitrefill will put in a requirement. I think that you basically have to open a big channel if you want to open one with them. And so potentially in the future there might be some secret sauce around it on who you permit to open a channel with you. And you might say, Hey, if you’re gonna open a channel to me, I want at least this much balance on my side to give me account for my risk account for my mining fee, et cetera.
Jack Mallers: Yeah. Yup. And, and I think that a lot of services have much more dynamic relationships. So for example, Olympus and Zap, we have a relationship directly with the consumer. So we can’t really have this type of minimum. We obviously want to protect against dust channels, but I mean if a user buys $25 worth and they don’t have any channels, I need to open a turbo channel to them. I need them to get onboarded. So do you have this concept of like gateway nodes, which are kind of more directly exposed to the consumer and then you have more backend routing nodes that just have larger channels manage Wumbo with other institutions and such? I think a lot of these answers are pretty unclear, but I agree that there’s going to be, and again, we can tie this back to the first topic of reputation. I think that lightning nodes will grow very smart and that there’ll be some more advanced logic that goes into your relationships on the network. And using things like public key as identity and understanding who is what on the network will become much, much more relevant, quicker than we think.
Stephan Livera: Right. It’ll be this pub key has really good up time and he has really good routing success. So I’m gonna give him a good rating in my little mental map or my little nodes model of who is a good participant. And maybe there’s, there’s going to be kind of a good participant and a bad model, you know, let’s say someone, a bad model might be some guy who goes offline. He’s like really unresponsive in terms of requests and messages and things.
Jack Mallers: Yeah. And even things like fee rate, like I think LNBig is, is experimenting with some crazy fees. Like I think ACINQ is 3% or something and, and potentially, I’m not actually sure about that, but LNBig keeps rising and dropping and rising and dropping. And if I have a direct relationship with the consumer Zap maybe I don’t want them so exposed to routes that are just gonna crush them. Right. And so yeah, uptime, you know, you can come to my imaginary front door of my lightning node and knock and say, “Hey, you know, I got 0.16 BTC, I’d like to open a channel, provide some liquidity”, and I can basically check the reputation system. Man, you go offline a lot. You’re not very responsible. I’m sorry, you’re going to have to walk home. Right. And we should have that type of reputation system. And I think it’s really important and right now no one’s really incentivized to make those decisions because who cares? I mean what the lightning torch and it doesn’t really matter but soon, very soon it will if lightning is to work.
Stephan Livera: So let’s talk a little bit I guess about Olympus and I’m onboarding people. So as I understand from some of your prior interviews, you were mentioning how you’ve had to rearchitect the service and Zap a little bit to provide for the KYC version and the non KYC version. Can you elaborate a bit?
Jack Mallers: Yeah. So I guess Olympus has always been designed to be a standalone component. So Zap will never require you to enter personal information to use the wallet. It will have to require you to enter personal information if you want to buy a commodity from me because I want no parts of jail. Simple as that. Right. Like you know, in today’s world we play by the rules of big brother when I stand and live on their soil.
Jack Mallers: So yeah, but Olympus is a standalone component so you can even have Zap without Olympus involved at all in the future. Just you can download a version that doesn’t have it installed on the wallet. And so I think that was really, really important and it also allows us great flexibility. Like I’m a fan of Zap, obviously I use it every day, but who would I be to say that Zap is going to be cool forever? I think there’s so many smart people, every day you see a new wallet. And for me to go through the work of compliance, really deep market expertise of streaming tight quotes and being able to handle high volumes and deliver them to the consumer. I think anyone should be able to use that. So have it be more flexible as a standalone piece and plug into anyone and it, it’s much more opt in and it’s much more flexible.
Jack Mallers: So I think that was really, really important. To deliver such a cool service in such a cool innovation within lightning, but then also remain to our principles, which, which we’ll never divorce from was, was really important.
Stephan Livera: Talking through that operation. So the customer wants to come to you and they want to pay you USD. So let’s say I’ll go 50 USD and I want $50 in a lightning channel. And so what does that look like from talking through, in terms of like, where are they clicking? What are they doing with that?
Jack Mallers: Yeah so within the desktop application for example there’s just a big orange buy Bitcoin button and that’s really cool. And you click it. And if you’re a new user, you onboard yourself with whatever information, you know, I really went through a lot to try and get the KYC AML as low as possible.
Jack Mallers: So there are States within the US where I really got it down to just name, email address, birthday. Right. And, and obviously there are other countries and other regulations where I don’t have that luxury, but you onboard yourself and then you just enter the number that you want, you click buy. And for Olympus there’s a lot of complicated details as far as streaming quotes, managing risk, right? Because as a seller of Bitcoin, we are inherently short Bitcoin by just giving it away. Right? Like no one wants to be in that position of essentially assuming Bitcoin is going to stay at the same price or go down. Yep. So there’s a lot of advanced market activity into who we tie into to be partners to manage that exposure. Do we have futures positions that we kind of assess our risk with?
Jack Mallers: Do we have an opinion on the market ourselves? Do I not want to? Right. And this goes for the sell side as well. So we handle all of that. And then from a lightning aspect, we have a lot of advanced things we can deliver the BTC and a lot of clever ways. Do you have enough capacity? Well what even if you have a a hundred dollars worth of receive and you buy $100, do I want to wipe away all of your receive capacity? Is AMP implemented? Do I use a turbo channel? Do you want it on chain? Do I use some form of swap? I mean a lot of that is really complicated. And then obviously what people don’t understand is that the relationship with the consumer is forever. It’s not a one time purchase. So as soon as the Bitcoins are delivered, not only is that service completed, but then they use the Bitcoins through your liquidity profile.
Jack Mallers: So managing that and ensuring uptime and often rebalancing is really, really important. So there’s a lot of hidden complexities in there which make for this a really tough problem. And I think that’s why you don’t see everyone trying to solve it is there’s a wide range of expertise, right? There’s expertise in the compliance aspect. There’s expertise, a lot of it in, in markets in streaming quotes and liquidity profiles to the consumer. And then there’s obviously lightning, like, you know, implementing turbo into the LND codebase was interesting. And managing liquidity, understanding the consumer and the best way to deliver efficiently designed for user experience. And a lot of this is going to be trial and error, but it’s a large project which is an array of expertise that you have to kind of conquer.
Stephan Livera: Mmm. Yeah. Out of curiosity, how do you handle failure modes? In the example of let’s say I try to buy $50 USD and you try to pay $50 through to my channel and maybe there’s a problem on the route and you know, there’s this stuck payment or it just, it doesn’t, route. What, what, what’s the fullback in that goes?
Jack Mallers: Well, we could do a lot of things and I think that the truth is going to come just from the user, right? Like the fallback could easily be turbo channel. The fallback can just be on chain. The fallback could be some form of swap or the fallback could be we just give you your money back. Right. I think like people have to understand that this is a service and there is no decentralized version of, of dollars. Right. And, but I think that that’s important. Like who cares, man. I mean decentralization is a sliding scale and, and I think people can move it to their preference. It’s not very, it’s not binary at all. So I think with that, we’ll just have to learn like, does a user want the detailed option of selecting, I would like this purchase to be delivered over lightning.
Jack Mallers: And if it’s not, then I want to cancel it. I don’t want a new channel. I don’t want it on chain. Because of the privacy implications are such like, or do they not care? Do they want us to kind of do that in the background. So right now we do a lot of it in the background and these are the things that we’re testing internally and with some beta users and we’ll continue to expand it. But the short answer is, I don’t know. I’m excited to learn. The long answer is, you know, of course there are various fallbacks of, you know, try lightning payment lighting, payment doesn’t work. Think about turbo, think about on chain, does the user have some preference set in the wallet, et cetera, et cetera.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, that’s, that’s cool. One other point around hot wallet risk. So obviously any Bitcoin business and particularly obviously lightning business rather, they’ve got to think about hot wallets. And do you have any thoughts on how to manage that risk? Are there any technical innovations that we need in Bitcoin and lightning to help them and better enable them to manage that hot wallet risk?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, for sure. Like lightning hardware wallets would be nice. And I just think that there’s a lot of learning to do with lightning as at the more institutional level. Okay. I think that, I mean the hot wallets have existed forever and exchanges with hot wallets that basically are there for the convenience of the user have been around for a really long time. Zap won’t be the first to kind of go about this to type of of strategy. But managing them and being able to basically refill like, I don’t know if Zap has 10 BTC on a lightning hot wallet and it’s constantly ready and obviously if people are always buying, then this is depleting, depleting, depleting.
Jack Mallers: What’s the most efficient way to restock from cold storage? Is it as simple as sending from a cold storage just sending to my LND and just boom, I’m restocked, right? Like how many of those funds need to be on lightning? Do I use loop? I mean a lot of this stuff, again, I have my opinions, but I think the only way to really figure it out is to just do it. And so I, that’s what I’m most excited about is just doing and just trying. And so we’ll see. We’ll see. I I consider it a seriously unsolved problem. Like I’m really excited for the world where Zap has this set of nodes where part of it is really exposed to the consumer. And the other part has these wumbo relationships with CMT digital, with Akuna, with Cumberland, with exchanges and, and trying to be the centerpiece of, of bridge between deep liquidity within the Bitcoin space and the end consumer.
Jack Mallers: And trying to make that the most effective relationship possible is a huge problem. And there’s so many unknowns, which makes it really hard, but it makes it super exciting.
Stephan Livera: Yeah, I’m really excited. I think, yeah, I think Zap is such a great project and you know, I love using the wallet. You mentioned earlier about the, the perfect user onboarding is that the person comes in for an interview with you and yeah. And you figure out if they’re a legit person, if they’re going to stay online, you know I think we’re pretty much coming to the time this, so do you want to just tell them where they can find you and whether they can come for the in person interview?
Jack Mallers: Yeah, you can come to Chicago and have a beer with me anytime. I love Bitcoiners as my family. So if you want an in person interview, I’ll get you a beer in Chicago, DM me on Twitter. But yeah, unfortunately I didn’t have the foresight to make anonymous accounts when I joined Bitcoin Twitter so my full name is is everywhere. Jack Mallers on Twitter, and we’ve got Slacks and such. I’m really not, I’m the opposite of shy. My opinions are loud and it’s very easy to find me. So hit me up. I love you guys. Thank you for the support and I appreciate being here.