So the closing panel, it's gonna be like an overview of what's
happening in Bitcoin and I want to start with the question that I started with
last year and I'm wondering what the answers are going to be this year. What
do you think is the current state of Bitcoin compared to last year? What's
what's happening? Let's start with Elizabeth maybe because she's so positive.
So by the way, last year I was sitting next to Craig Wright, Peter, so I don't
know what happened here. His name tag actually said Craig Wright. Well obviously
I'm biased because you know I've been in the weeds of the lightning world but to
me one thing that I think has been really exciting is you know there's this
concept of BIDL, although I don't even know how to properly pronounce it but
HODL to build, and I really think we've seen so many developers come into the
community so much excitement. I've actually met a lot of people that said
for example for lightning you know they were interested in Bitcoin and maybe
they were you know building applications and doing like web development and
lightning was something that got them interested in Bitcoin. So to see a lot
of new people come into the community get interested and exciting, excited
about all this stuff to me has been incredible over the past year. I also
think this year was way less dramatic, right? So if you guys remember like
about a year ago breaking Bitcoin Paris, it was like the height of everything
that was going on with Node2x and you know the community prevailed, right?
Like Bitcoin was not attacked at the end of the day, of course as we all
knew and I think we're reliant on you know Bitcoin is not ruled by any one
party. There are so many different parties involved and it will not be
attacked by a small group of people you know in a hotel room like trying to make
deals and I think we've seen the evolution of things have we focused on
building and coming out with you know taproot, graph root of people have
followed what's going on there, cool new technologies instead of a lot of the
distractions that were there previously. So to me this has been a year of really
just building technology.
Yeah, bear markets are great for developers. I remember the I guess the
the last bear market was actually when I went full-time. It was like shortly after
the Mt. Gox crash and there was a lot of despair everywhere.
You didn't have any money there? No, thankfully but you know a lot of people
questioning whether or not Bitcoin would be around in a few years, whether or not
it was going to go anywhere, you know whether like this was the end and we
were just grinding down into nothingness and you know this bear market has
definitely had its fair share of despair and and and a few people who might come
up with various reasons to believe that you know there will never be another
great bubble again and whatnot but I think that you know once again with
another hype cycle we managed to capture a lot of interest and you know some of
those people may have lost interest but I think that a lot of them have stuck
around and it seems like that the people who have looked beyond just like price
and exchange rates have realized that there really is a lot going on and that
the the developer momentum has continued if not accelerated at least in part due
to lightning, due to growing of the ecosystem, creating a lot more jobs and
so at least at Casa when we're looking ahead right now we think one of our
biggest challenges is just going to be hiring.
Eric? I'm just writing code. To me probably the most noticeable thing is a
year ago everybody was just talking about splits and forks and how mayhem was
going to ensue if you know somebody dared run their node differently than
somebody else I didn't really care and now I like that we don't talk about that
stuff anymore because it's happened and it's not a big deal so we can keep
writing code. You know in probably the past hour well between last time I was on
stage and now what you know 30 minutes ago I probably did more Bitcoin
transactions than I'd done like in the entire year prior because I was sitting
on yalls.org reading through some articles and paying with lightning and
they all just work and they're kind of magic and there's it's just magic and
that's kind of a very very new experience and it kind of meets it lives
up to many of these expectations people go have now you know I can go say lots
of put how other aspects of lightning I think add dangers to Bitcoin and so on
but the reality is the user experience side of it actually works and you know I
think it's incredible seeing something go from such a prototype you know ID on
a piece of paper stage something that you can actually run on a phone and
actually make a payment and that's actually instant and I think it really
shows what you can go do building on top of Bitcoin and I'd say that other baby
and I know other people touch on other ways I think Bcash was wonderful for
Bitcoin because it's split and let all these people do their own thing and
that's a wonderful outcome you know they have different philosophy and we may not
agree with them but let them do their thing and not bother us and they can say
whatever they want on our BTC and Bcash Twitter and it's really not our problem
so I will try to be quite short so and I would like to put the guns a so first
they ignore you then they allowed to you they they try to fight you and then even
so and answering what state they are so I think they are something between fight
and win so there is 75 forks right now of Bitcoin so none of them even have
value but just to get the consensus just to go forward faster you should like be
agree what you're doing and how you're doing and then the forks is splitting
for a separate separate solution separate blockchain so it's meaning the
people who was hungry was disturbing who was disagree was practically breaking
you to make the future steps they right now have their own project and they are
trying to prove what they are more capable they are more efficient they are
built trying to build more efficient solution and it's meaning we can move
faster the Bitcoin is still number one if you check the source code of all like
altcoins so for most of altcoins they are copying the Bitcoin and it's
practically 90% so they are trying to reach their own goals they are trying to
get the faster transaction they are trying to do a lot of things but what
most of them are missing they are missing the brilliant equilibrium what
Bitcoin did so the Bitcoin consists from three different points its technical
solution its economical solution and it's also social equilibrium so and it's
building the absolutely new dimension how all the economy is working it's
practically met and changing the old style economy from two-dimensional for
three-dimensional and this is why the lot of financial guys are making their
mistakes so they are trying to find the analogies and Bitcoin doesn't have
analogies it's a evolutionary more efficient tool and they are still
exploring it all right so I would like to come back to one of the biggest
developments that happened this year to lightning and Elizabeth you talked so
positively about you know all the changes and adoption happening but I
really would like to know what do you think are the current challenges with
lightning what are there any issues that you think are important and you know
hard to solve maybe at this point so first of all one thing I should say is
when we release the main net beta we intentionally did not have a UI for that
because we knew this was early you know bait this is an early beta like it's not
done and I think James had actually had a great tweet about this when will
lightning be done well it'll never be done it's a process it's an ongoing
process you know Bitcoin is still in beta as long as Bitcoin is in beta
lightning will definitely be in beta and for quite a while longer as well so this
is not done and it's not ready it's an ongoing process you know there are bugs
like we've had incredible testing from the community but please do not put like
three hundred twenty five thousand dollars on the network at this point in
time as mentioned in terms of challenges I'm really passionate about usability
and of course you know some people have tweeted like lightning is so unusable
nobody will ever be able to use it well it turns out people can use it but
certainly in terms of getting users familiar with the concept of having funds
in lightning and funds out of lightning so one analogy I've used is if the Bitcoin
blockchain is like a decentralized savings account lightning is like a
decentralized transaction account or checking account with instant payments
so I think first of all getting people for example with all the lightning apps
that are out there they're typically aside from htlc.me non-custodial so
there's the key management issue which is a general issue not just for lightning
but for Bitcoin more broadly especially if we want to bring users that aren't as
familiar with these concepts you know if they're like oh I have to write down all
these words what if I lose them so working on those challenges kind of the
intersection of security and usability but then also the concept of channels
our goal is to not have to have most users even look at that if you're
advanced and you want to go into settings so in our app you can see in the
advanced mode you can look at your channels but our goal is to really
simplify this but we're not there yet you know people it's awesome that Peter
is like using an app and buying stuff on y'alls but for example with the mobile
apps that are out there today you can only send and you cannot receive and
that's because we don't have watchtowers yet right so I cannot stress that we've
made amazing progress but we're still very early you know we're in the mid
90s in the internet world we have not even had the advent of the mobile phone
yet so to speak you know the iPhone came out in 2007 so I think a lot of it is
just going to be hard work and building out the routing infrastructure getting
watchtowers up and running like getting a good UI just there's a lot of work
left to be done and it's going to be challenging and I think we'll get there
but it's going to take time and people want it in a lot of ways to be like
already done and we're just not there yet I also want to go point out you know
you referred to me using flight and go here for all I've deliberately made a
choice go and use a Claire for that with default settings exactly like any other
user would use because I want to go see it from their point of view you know I'm
not using lightning through a node that I run I'm not using a Claire with you
know my own payment channel setup I'm using it right out of the box the same
way anyone would doing the most obvious thing because I want to see that
experience I remember you were tweeting maybe six months ago you installed
lightning wallet and you said oh it's unusable and then like barely like a
month passed and you said oh now it's actually usable now it's something so I
guess do you see that progress continuing every month in fact like not
only did it go from that this is completely unusable to this actually
kind of works I mean even more recently I noticed well last time I tried it maybe
a month ago payments were taking you know a few seconds to go and get the
initial routing or whatever the heck Claire is doing behind the scenes last
time I was trying it earlier just every payment worked instantly now Alex I had
a chance to talk to one of your engineers who are working on lightning
and said they actually something that Roger Ver I'm sure would be happy to
hear they actually have a coffee machine in Kiev accepting lightning payments
do you have any thoughts on on lightning right now on the state of lightning and
whether it's usable so they first of all and I I need even to repeat myself like
year ago so just to create like mass adoption and usage you should try the
technology each day and just to better understand the technology you need the
documentation the Bitcoin and lightning is still missing a documentation but
there is a reason why it doesn't have a documentation because it's still in
development and we're developing and why the like using the coffee machine in
Kiev using the lightning because people can just each day it's really developers
and everyone who is in office they can touch the technology they can understand
how it's working then they immediately need they immediately get the knowledge
what need to be changed to make it really useful and they feeling and they
understand the technology but they also need to create more developers because if
it doesn't have the developers so it's very hard to adopt any technology the
it's really made quite a great point just to make the three more usable so
during one year six companies was constantly training the developers and
they practically create the developer society if you take the developer and
he already know how to use technology and you're asking him to build something
so he will definitely build what he know and for for lightning for Bitcoin I
think they need to create more developers and just to create the more
developers so they need to train them this is what they like open source and
open source software right now is missing the user interface like the
Elizabeth said so I think if there'll be a lot of implementation already see quite
a lot of implementation in mobile phones in mobile wallets people are also trying
to integrate it in real like merchant services in coffee machines just to try
but the needs really good documentation and I think they need also to somehow
self-organize and create the maybe foundation maybe separate communities
who will constantly train how to use the technology who will constantly create
the documentation so I have a couple questions about lighting for Jameson
and Eric and that they're kind of related to what you were talking about
does lightning help with anonymity and does it help with resisting the state
and you know Bitcoin being black market money something people don't want to
hear but does it help or does it not help what are the implications I think
it helps because it has a stronger privacy by default and defaults are very
important it is of course you know possible to retain a decent amount of
privacy on chain and Bitcoin but it takes a lot of work and you have to
understand a lot of different threat vectors whereas you know lightning well
while Bitcoin was originally thought of as this anonymous money I don't think it
was really developed with that in mind it was it was always a pseudonymous but
but lightning has really been developed with strong privacy in mind and so while
there there still will probably be privacy considerations especially with
regard to like how the on-chain privacy translates to the off-chain privacy when
you're opening closing channels and whatnot that's where I think you'll
hopefully eventually be able to take more of the advances in on-chain privacy
especially as we start getting better types of coin join better types of
aggregated signatures you know baked into it so I'm hoping to see a sort of
merging of better on-chain privacy to complement the off-chain so I don't
actually work on lightning and I tend not to comment on the specifics of
protocols that I haven't implemented but I think generally and probably more to
the point of your question for me from a crypto economic standpoint layering
makes sense right what you want to avoid in scaling is reducing the security of
the base layer so by allowing people to make what I call local security trade
off right a person-to-person transaction can be done with a little less security
and therefore a little bit more performance you're not damaging the
security of the underlying layer and then I think that's the important
observation about layering in general and I assume the lightning is making
that trade-off in a reasonable way okay change of subject I'm sure a lot of
people here in the audience they came here because they wanted to learn how to
use Bitcoin in their own business maybe start their own Bitcoin business and I
was wondering what your thoughts are because I'm most most of the people here
are from the US Alex is not and I'm sorry Canadian here right I'm sorry yeah
pure Australia right 51st state okay beautiful so I was wondering like what
do you think is the best place to start a Bitcoin business these days what is
the if you have any thoughts well actually to talk on this and you really
need to go start it around earth to the speed of light because once you get far
enough away you know the time dilation all it all screws things up but quite
seriously I mean there aren't really governments around the world that are
that against it to the point where you couldn't do anything at all and equally
you know the risks you should kind of take I think are a lot more like who you
go deal with I mean when I got another way I would disagree in Venezuela there
are a few out there that is true there are some places are so screwed up but
you know for the most part like probably most people in this audience are in a
reasonable place to start a Bitcoin business and I would more focus on
really like what are you actually doing and there is an exodus of businesses
from China obviously these days right and I mean miners are still operating
there but they're they're continuously clamping down on but I mean like as an
example like I'm a consultant you know it's hard to go find places where you
couldn't go and do that in the world where you wouldn't be at risk of other
things you know if I'm off in Venezuela I'm at a risk no matter what I do if I'm
off in China I'm at a risk no matter what I do and I think you really got at
the discussion terms of what's your actual business plan what are you doing
does it fit in your jurisdiction and fortunately that would often mean talking
to lawyers and local people and really what more matters is like can you
actually have community can you go meet people but of course online works very
well I mean nobody I know in my city really does much Bitcoin stuff with few
exceptions but then of course I meet everyone around at conferences like this
yeah I think in a way so for example with Lightning Labs we're based in the
US but we have folks around the world and there's this old concept of like
these big tech companies where you had to be in like Silicon Valley or
somewhere else and we don't have that anymore I mean we will hire people
anywhere and if we only stuck to one location we wouldn't be able to you know
finding Bitcoin developers is really hard I highly recommend if folks
haven't gotten involved yet there are many jobs out there you know go take
Jimmy Song seminar you know read up with the Princeton Bitcoin book Mastering
Bitcoin so on and so forth lots of online resources there's gonna be no
dearth of jobs in this area anytime soon so from my standpoint and from our
standpoint this community is global I mean the Berlin hack days just sprung up
because people you know my friends over there were excited about lightning we
didn't tell them to go do this so I really do think we don't have to be in
any particular location in terms of starting a business there are for
certain say custodial businesses they're gonna be regulatory concerns but if
you're just building software and building ways for people to you know
hold their own funds I think there are a variety of places and you don't just
have to be in the old traditional place okay so I would like to turn the
questions a little bit otherwise so first of all I will definitely will not
go to run any business in North Korea so the China and start yeah the China the
China else are not looking like a good place but at least they can assign some
ranks and say what is a pros and coins absolutely same but the rest country but
there is two parts of else then you're asking when I love around the business
so if I am receiving can accept sending and accepting the Bitcoin payment it's
different point but if you would like to create the product so first of all you
should get the trained and educated resources and there is like a lot of
sports around the globe there is a lot of qualified specialists and you can
hire them and there is another sports so there is a government's already set up
regulations and they creating the good obstacles and the one of the good
example is a Malta or Georgia they not just setting the regulation they are not
just trying to understand the technology they also start to educate people and
this is the most greatest point because you're getting resources there is a lot
of developers up in Ukraine there is a lot of developers and Belorussia there
is a lot of developers are still in San Francisco but the price there is too high
and there is also quite a lot of questions if you would like to build the
new business and you just choice it you're just choosing within location
trying to find the optimal balance between everything
one of the most interesting Bitcoin meetups I've ever been to is in Nairobi
Kenya and you know that may not come to mind as well I should start a Bitcoin
business there but they had actual use cases for Bitcoin actually needed it to
go move money around and depending on your temperament and what kind of
business you might go run maybe some place that you wouldn't consider is the
right place maybe actually going off to Venezuela and helping people smuggle
money past the government is actually the best thing you can go do with your
skill set it might not be the safest thing to do but you know places you may
not consider it may actually need this more I mean Bitcoin after all is let's
face it not replacement for fiat if you assume governments are trustworthy you
know if you make that assumption fiat's gonna be pretty efficient but if you're
not making that assumption then Bitcoin starts to look attractive well where in
the world are you not gonna make that assumption well I'm gonna end up
restating pretty much what Peter said took my stole my thunder but 20 to 30
percent of the world's economy is black market and in many parts of the world
that's what keeps alive so go break the law it's a black market money so the
Peter touch one the the very very useful and valued points to only less than seven
percent of the population on the globe have access to banking system and I
think the exactly the Africa and Ford countries they will first of all will
push forward adoption for a Bitcoin because it's quite easy to use Bitcoin
you doesn't need any banks you just need the mobile phone and they have mobile
phones there is almost like 68 percent of the globe population have mobile
phones so they just need to provide them useful application I think Bitcoin plus
the lightning can be exactly this like solution altogether what they'll push
everything for it and these fourth party will start to use very very simple tool
which really allow them to perform payment and also say from the inflation
also say from like very regulated government or dirty governments who are
just stealing money and doesn't do anything all right so this is gonna be
the final question because I know everybody's tired you guys gonna be here
on the record and I want you to make a prediction any any any prediction and
we're gonna come back to this next year and see you know this materialized or
not but make maybe one prediction what's gonna happen in Bitcoin in one year it
could be anything could be stupid could be not but maybe start with Jameson I
think that Bitcoin is going to remain a top contender I think that we have you
know sufficient network effect sufficient interest investment developer
etc etc that I would bet against any sort of flippening of any kind so you
don't think B cash is going to be a thing no why not I'm optimistic a lot
about a lot of things but not that they have such a vibrant community though
prediction is hard especially about the future I predict that half the
predictions will be wrong I better go predict that I'm gonna go ship robust
calendar backup system for open timestamps and make my rust proof
Marshall stuff public of course I would have said the same thing last year but
I'm way late on it so you can make fun of me next year so I will try to be
quite ignorant on my prediction so I doesn't want to predict the price and I
doesn't want to predict what will happen in the global economy so my opinion the
global economy is facing the crisis and it will happen so in nearest maybe five
ten years but the Bitcoin can be the really the saver and it can help to
reload all the economy but what they'll happen like in nearest years a lot of
altcoins will definitely fall down because they doesn't have the real
economy by definition the real economy if then you providing like then you're
using like the currency for real deals for buying the gods or selling the
services and the most of altcoins they are right now just like play-tool they
are played on the exchanges but they doesn't have the real use case in real
life and all the people they are gaming through educational face right now they
are trying to understand what the blockchain and what the altcoins what
the Bitcoin is and some of them will fail same like the which ICO the SEO is
a great tool but right now he doesn't know still how to use it and they're
making quite a lot of mistakes and this is the educational face on the next
level the the real while you will stay and if else will you will fall down
Elizabeth I have a few predictions now that I've had time to think so my first
is I'm gonna predict that we're going to have a snore implementation by next year
because I really want that to happen fingers crossed second a lot more
people will be using lightning on mobile phones once we have watchtowers up and
running because we want people to be able to send and receive and then third
so one thing we saw in the past year which I thought was really fascinating
was a lot of these as I call them IFOs last year for coins were attacked we saw
various 51% attacks other double spend attacks mining attacks I'm going to
predict we're going to see a lot more of those with other coins especially as
the cost to attack them decreases and people you know these are things where
we've said for years like hey this is an issue what if this actually happens and
what we've all seen to play out so I think we'll see more and more attacks on
altcoins as well in the coming year thanks everyone let's give a huge round
of applause okay thank you thank you everyone I think it was a great day and
we're gonna have an after party and it's in a building nearby and see you all
tomorrow.