WBD371 Audio Transcription
Lightning Series: Mastering Lightning with Andreas M. Antonopoulos & René Pickhardt
Interview date: Monday 12th July
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Andreas M. Antonopoulos & René Pickhardt. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
In this interview, I talk to Bitcoin Speaker, Author & Educator Andreas M. Antonopoulos and Lightning Network developer René Pickhardt. We discuss how the Lightning Network works and why scaling off-chain is so essential.
“All the stuff that I’m working on is built on the shoulders of giants…I didn’t invent the Lightning Network, when I saw this technology I thought it was just beautiful.”
— René Pickhardt
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: Andreas, how are you mate? We haven't spoken in a while. How're you doing?
Andreas Antonopoulos: I'm doing great, Peter. How are you?
Peter McCormack: I'm very good, thank you. Very happy because I went to Wembley last night and watched England get to a final. I was talking to René about that. René, are you well?
René Pickhardt: Yeah, I'm fine.
Peter McCormack: Good.
René Pickhardt: Didn't sleep so much last night, but that's okay. I cheered for you.
Peter McCormack: Why; because you were so nervous about England on Sunday?
René Pickhardt: Not really!
Peter McCormack: Listen, about a couple of years ago I did a month of shows all about Lightning which was very cool, people loved it, but a lot has happened since then. René approached us and said, "Listen, I think you should do this again", so we decided to do a week of shows. Also, it's becoming more important again because, as you know, I've spent a lot of time out in El Salvador recently and my only experience with Bitcoin there is using the Lightning Network. I've come to an understanding how in different geographies, the reliance on basechain versus the Lightning Network is quite different.
So, I think it's a good time to revisit Lightning to talk about where we are with it, but I've also got a lot of new listeners now and maybe they don't know about the Lightning Network, so it would be good to give them a primer on things. You're both working on the Mastering Lightning book. How's that going?
Andreas Antonopoulos: It's going. We're in the final month actually. So, there are just a couple of weeks left to deliver the final draft to the publisher and then the longer process of production, copy editing, editing, proofreading, etc, goes into gear with the goal to deliver to actual print by the end of the year, so Christmas time really.
Peter McCormack: Wow, because I remember you telling me about that when I saw you in London. That was about two years ago when you announced it.
Andreas Antonopoulos: It was two years ago, yeah. It was scheduled to be completed in one year, but I don't know if you noticed some things happened in 2020 causing some unscheduled delays.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, a little thing called a pandemic! Yeah, I think it affected all of us. René, how's it been for you working on it?
René Pickhardt: It's an amazing progress and I'm really, really happy that Andreas reached out and asked if we want to write a book together and do this, because my English, as people can hear, is not that great.
Peter McCormack: Come on.
René Pickhardt: And Andreas is being ridiculously helpful on that.
Peter McCormack: Your English is very good.
René Pickhardt: Just yesterday, there was this amazing thing that happened that some folks from Atlanta started a book reading club; because we're writing this book completely open source, eight chapters already finished on GitHub, and they start doing I think biweekly meetings and reading a chapter per week, and they're discussing this stuff. I was on this channel listening to what they were discussing and this also was a great way of getting feedback. I was, "This is so amazing, people care so much about the topic; it's unbelievable. The Lightning Network is just so important".
Peter McCormack: Is this going to be a book for the techies, the hardcore bitcoiners or is this going to be a book for everyone? Of course, you'll say I should read it because of my job, but I tried Mastering Bitcoin, Andreas, and it gets a bit tricky for me at times.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, I'm guessing Mastering Bitcoin got tricky after chapter 3 for you.
Peter McCormack: Yes, yes.
Andreas Antonopoulos: That's quite intentional. The way I've written books before, and we're replicating that in Mastering the Lightning Network, is there is a gentle slope at the beginning which is intended to be readable by anyone who has a technical interest. Then things get technical; they ramp up from there.
Now, you can skim and get a lot of value and pick up nuances that you didn't know about by reading past the point where you are befuddled. You have to have the tolerance for simply ignoring things that don't make sense in the first reading and moving past them. With the Lightning Network, the book is structured effectively in two parts. Part 1 is chapters 1 through 5; you can actually read that, it's already available to O'Reilly early readers, as well as of course on GitHub.
Chapters 1 through 5 give you a broad overview of what the Lightning Network is, why it exists, how it works, and walks through an example of using it in practice with our favourite participants, Alice and Bob. It also describes how you can run your own node and describes various software packages that can help you do that, because a lot of people when they find the Lightning Network realise this is a good opportunity to run your own node if you want to have full control over your Bitcoin in the Lightning Network. Then when that ends, you have a nice overview and it's accessible to anyone with a bit of technical understanding and a desire to learn.
From chapter 6 onwards, we go into the architecture and how it actually works. We start talking about how payment channels are constructed, followed by how things are routed using hash time locked contracts, how those are embedded into commitments on the channels, onion routing, pathfinding, the communications protocol, all of the nitty gritty detail. That's highly technical, but again, this is designed to be a textbook that can also be used at a college level, within a computer science degree, and can appeal to a developer who has a technical understanding of computer science concepts like protocols and cryptography, a basic understanding of those things, but no understanding of Lightning.
In fact, we even have an appendix called Bitcoin Fundamentals Review which teaches you only those parts of Bitcoin you need in order to understand Lightning. So, you can come into this without a deep foundation on the blockchain technologies of Bitcoin, Lightning, etc.
Peter McCormack: Do you know what? I think I might actually do that, because the first time I looked at Mastering Bitcoin, you're right, I think I did about three chapters and then it got a bit too advanced for me. I might go back to it, because I've learned a lot more over the last three years and maybe I'll find it a bit easier. So, I think I'm going to do that first.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Absolutely.
Peter McCormack: I can do that in advance of the next book. Back when I did that Lightning month, my podcast used to do 10,000 to 20,000 per show listeners and now we're ranging from 50,000 to 150,000 a show. Most of that increase has been over the last few months, because we've had a bull run, so lots of new people coming in. So, I'm never afraid to revisit the absolute basics to help people understand. I think that's what the goal of this week of shows is; it's really for those people who are new to Bitcoin or have a vague understanding of Lightning, or have maybe been in Bitcoin in a while but never really looked at the Lightning Network. It's to help those, so I will ask some very basic questions today, but you know I do that anyway.
So, René, we're going to kick things off. Do you want to start by explaining what the Lightning Network is, what the role of the Lightning Network is within Bitcoin, what it does different from the Basechain? Just give us a good kick off.
René Pickhardt: Okay, I'll try my best.
Peter McCormack: Your question, man.
René Pickhardt: The Lightning Network is an incredibly smart way of using Bitcoin. The best thing about it is once you have a software that uses the Lightning Network, you don't have to worry about it; the software does it for you. When I say it's a smart way of using Bitcoin, what I mean is when you use Bitcoin in the way how it was intended to be used, you could do something like seven transactions per second in the entire network, over the entire world. So, this is not a global-scale currency kind of thing.
With the Lightning Network, we can do instant payments, we can settle them directly and we can do basically as many as we want with them. As of right now, they are also very cheap and there's good reasons to believe that they will stay cheap. The Lightning Network is just a way how people should use Bitcoin and it took us quite some while to find out that this is how Bitcoin should be used in many cases.
There are, of course, other ways to use Bitcoin, right. I'm not saying it's solely Lightning, but it's very useful.
Peter McCormack: Let's explain specifically the difference between the basechain and the Lightning Network. Very few people start with the Lightning Network. It does happen, I've seen it out in El Salvador; some people have just downloaded Lightning wallets, Wallet of Satoshi, especially people part of the Bitcoin Beach project, that's their entire experience of Bitcoin. But most people I tend to deal with, their first experience of Bitcoin is either downloading a wallet and a friend giving them some Bitcoin, or going on to exchange and buying some.
So, their main experience is the basechain where they get used to this idea that they have to send it to this funny address, and then it appears straightaway, but maybe about an hour later they can spend it. So, it's probably a good point to explain why that it is, why it takes about an hour on the basechain and what the Lightning Network changes for Bitcoin.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, so I think in the future, many people will have an experience where essentially, the border between Bitcoin and Lightning is a bit blurred, meaning that you have a wallet and you send money to an address, and you don't know how exactly it's being delivered. Some payments are going to be made over the Lightning Network where it makes sense to use the Lightning Network; and some payments may be over Bitcoin where it makes sense to use Bitcoin instead.
In fact, the Lightning Network has within its features a so-called fallback system, so that you can have a Lightning payment that looks to the new user the same way the first experience of Bitcoin addresses: a long string of incomprehensible letters and numbers. The only difference is that instead of that string starting with BC1, it starts with LN and that's a Lightning invoice. So, you scan that or you scan a QR code and it tells you you need to make a payment and you say, "Approved".
Within that Lightning invoice, there's actually encoded, or it's possible to encode, a fallback Bitcoin address so that you can also make an on-chain payment. In fact, I think blurring the line between on-chain and off-chain is something that would be part of the user experience, because then you have one wallet. It doesn't really tell you if your funds are on chain or off chain; it juggles between on-chain and off-chain funds, managers, payment channels. In the background it chooses how to make a payment in exactly the same way that when you make a phone call today, you don't choose satellite or undersea fibre optic or a microwave radio tower to decide how it's going to get to the other end. That depends on a lot of other factors that happen in the background. The system decides for you.
I hope that the experience becomes as transparent as that, but in many ways it's similar to Bitcoin. You have an incomprehensible string. It prompts you, "Do you want to send an amount to this string?" You say, "Yes" and a second later, it's done. Unlike Bitcoin, you don't have to wait an hour. Your funds are available to the recipient and completely finalised, settled if you like, within one to two seconds.
The fee that you pay is measured in satoshis and then you're, "Well, how much did I pay?" "Yeah, I paid 100 satoshis". "Well, how much is that?" And then you go into some weird arithmetic and figure out that you paid €0.0003, which is such a ridiculously low amount that it's basically zero; so, instant, very private, final and cheap. That's the essence of the Lightning Network. It's a way to use Bitcoin that actually makes it really usable across a broad range of payment sizes.
Peter McCormack: That's what made it so interesting for me after my last visit to El Salvador. I went out at the start of May, like I normally did, with some dollars in my pocket because it's a dollarised country. But just out of novelty and just liking to support the local community in El Zonte, I would buy some things on the Lightning Network. What was quite interesting was, when I went back to interview the president four weeks later, I didn't have any dollars left and I didn't get any out. I just used my Lightning wallet because pretty much everywhere in El Zonte accepted it.
I did use the ATM and get some dollars out at one point, but the key thing for me was is we went up to El Tunco, which is the next village up from El Zonte, and there was a coffee shop and I ended up buying a coffee for three of us there. What I realised at the time is that I can go to another country without having to withdraw money; I don't have to use my debit card, which has I think two fees, the exchange fee but also the bank fee for using it, which sometimes can be 50 pence or £1 or $1 just for every time I use the card; I paid virtually zero fee as you said; and it was virtually instant.
It just made me think at the time, as people travel more, move around the world, the more of these communities that happen, the easier it is for someone like me to travel without even having to consider having local currencies.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah. I think the first time I demonstrated the Lightning payment to someone, as they held up their wallet and they were in front of the screen that was going to receive their payment, I said, "Before you put your finger on send, switch your gaze to the recipient screen, because if you're still looking at send by the time you look up to the screen, it will already have arrived". That's what virtually instantaneous means; you'll miss it if you blink.
Now, that's the best-case scenario. Of course, there are other issues with the Lightning Network that it doesn't always work out that way. That's one of the areas that René has been doing an enormous amount of research.
Peter McCormack: Yes, René.
René Pickhardt: Yeah, but I wanted to actually emphasise and stress on the instantaneous part. I came into Bitcoin very late and I came actually over the Lightning Network. But, of course, I had to use Bitcoin at some point in time. I was amazed because it's this decentralised network, it's money that is sound; nobody controls it, it's amazing. But to use it, it doesn't really feel like it's the digital money of the internet. You have to wait for your block confirmation and all these things.
When you use the Lightning Network, this feels like email, this feels like instant messaging, right. You do something, it's there. The story that you told, Peter, I don't know if you saw it; I was smiling ridiculously. It made me so happy to see that this is finally happening, because Bitcoin is just this amazing invention and it has to be user-friendly and usable. What you're telling me is exactly the Bitcoin story actually, integrated in Lightning Network.
We have this global currency; we can go there, we can pay, we don't have to exchange, everybody knows what it's worth to them. With Lightning we can transact. Awesome. Sorry!
Peter McCormack: No, René, the great thing about that is, take me back to when I did that Lightning month. I did it because the show needed it and I should cover it. But also at the time, I had my doubts on the Lightning Network. I was, "Yeah, I'm sure it's cool" and, "Yeah great, but I'm never going to really use this. I use Bitcoin to store my wealth and maybe we'll do some invoice on it" and, "Occasionally I have to send somebody $1,000. I'll use the basechain. I don't see a scenario where I'm going to be using the Lightning Network".
People are, "Well no, in the future you'll be able to go into Starbucks". I'm, "Yeah. No, I won't. Let's be realistic. Hyperbitcoinisation isn't going to happen. Bitcoin is just going to be this asset that some of us hold and can spend sometimes". That's obviously completely changed by my experience in El Zonte. But the experience has changed not because that coffee shop accepted Lightning; it's because essentially El Zonte has hyperbitcoinised, if that's the correct way of putting it, as a community. I think there's one restaurant that doesn't accept it yet and I'm sure the pressure's on them to. But because that community has, it suddenly becomes a native currency there to use. You know you don't have to carry dollars or your debit card. You can just wander around with your phone, knowing everywhere you go you can pay. Suddenly, because I had that, that's when it ticked, "Okay, this works".
The next interesting step is, we know the government has made this massive bold step to make it legal tender in the country. We don't need to debate that now, but they've essentially written into law that every economic agent has to accept this. So, now I know it doesn't matter where I go in El Salvador, all I need is a Lightning wallet and I can pay for anything I want at any point.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah. It's a bit unfortunate, as you hinted, that the showcase example is one that involves a fair degree of coercion. But that doesn't detract from the technical aspect. I think when people first encounter the Lightning Network, their immediate reaction is very similar to the first reaction to Bitcoin, which is, "Where's the catch? There's got to be a catch. This can't actually do what I think it seems to be doing".
The first catch is, this isn't actually Bitcoin. This is some kind of custodial system; I've heard it often described as an IOU. I think it's very important to dispel these myths. There is no Lightning coin or anything like that; you are actually using Bitcoin, you are actually conducting Bitcoin transactions. Those Bitcoin transactions exist in a consensus layer that is an interaction between you and whoever you're connected to with a payment channel. Essentially, we're lifting the security properties of Bitcoin up a layer and accelerating them, but you still have the same fundamental principles.
The phrase that I coined, pun intended, "Not your keys, not your coin" applies here too. With Lightning, you have the keys and it is your coin, you're not giving up any of that. If you do it right, and there are of course custodial and non-custodial solutions, non-custodial solutions allow you to have control over your keys and when you have some of your Bitcoin in the Lightning payment channels, it doesn't restrict your ability. Often, we hear the phrase, "You lock your money into a payment channel" but in fact, you're unleashing your money into a payment channel because it's far more liquid and far more useful when it can be used to make instantaneous, secure, private and cheap payments.
At some point, time, vision and environment in which you would want to have all of the money that's not your retirement and savings, all of your chequing account money, if you want, your spending money in payment channels so that you can use it on the Lightning Network. On the odd occasion where you want to do an on-chain transaction without money, you would use a technology like splice out, or various other submarine swaps, as they're called. But basically, what you do is you make a Lightning payment to someone else and they atomically swap that to an on-chain transaction on your behalf. Again, trustless, non-custodial, but you can actually make an on-chain payment with your Lightning money and then still keep it in a payment channel. Every opportunity you have to make a payment, you use it instead to open a channel.
Let me give you an example, because people bring this point up all the time, "How do people open channels if opening and closing a channel costs a fee?" So, let's say, Peter, you come to my shop and you want to buy an awesome T-shirt that says, "Not your keys, not your coins" because of course why wouldn't you; and that T-shirt costs, I don't know, $20. You can make an on-chain payment. You can make a normal Bitcoin transaction payment and for a $20 T-shirt, depending on the fees at the time, it might be worth it. But a lot of the time it's really not. If your transaction fee is going to be $3, that's a significant cost.
But if you're going to incur that cost anyway, instead of buying that T-shirt with an on-chain transaction, it's better if you open a channel to my shop and make a Lightning payment. You're still going to do an on-chain transaction. Only that on-chain transaction will not be for the T-shirt; it will be for establishing a channel. If you establish a channel that's slightly bigger than the cost of the T-shirt, let's say $40, and then you make a Lightning payment over that channel to me for the T-shirt, you've got your T-shirt but now you also have a funded Lightning channel that has a $20 balance on my end, a $20 balance on your end so you can now both send and receive $20 across that, and you've opened your channel.
You paid the exact same fee that you would have paid to buy the T-shirt on-chain but instead, you've now put money in the Lightning Network; and your next payment to my shop is going to have zero fee and be instantaneous. Your next amount that you receive from someone else, because my shop is well-connected and can route, is also going to be near zero fee and instantaneous.
So, every opportunity you have, whenever you're making an on-chain transaction, instead you use that opportunity to establish or close or rebalance channels. Then the on chain is only used, fundamentally, either for very large wire transfers or for channel establishment, closure and rebalancing.
René Pickhardt: Or if we have a disagreement, we have a conflict.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Or if we have a disagreement. That's a great point, René. The Lightning Network depends on the edge case of dispute resolution between channel partners being resolved by Bitcoin, as the judge, through a system called penalty transactions. If you try to cheat on the Lightning Network, I go on chain and I take all the money.
Peter McCormack: We can come back to that but it's a really good point. I consider it like my Bitcoin wallet is like my bank account and the Lightning Network is like my wallet. It's just my cash wallet for when I want to go out and spend money here or there. Essentially, opening that first channel is like buying a wallet. I go to the shop and I'll spend $20, $30, $40 on a wallet. If I've got to open up a channel and have that on-chain fee to open it up, you don't have to open it instantly so you can put a few blocks down later and maybe only pay $1 or a few dollars, but then I'm open.
But we have jumped forward a step. Again, just for people who don't understand, René, let's just talk a little bit about opening channels, what it actually is and why you need to do that to be able to access and use the Lightning Network. Let's relate it back to somebody who's got a Bitcoin wallet, they want to go onto the Lightning Network; let's talk about how they do that, what's the process?
Andreas Antonopoulos: Maybe we can do this as a bit of theatre between me and René. René can demonstrate how to open a channel to me.
Peter McCormack: Okay, great.
René Pickhardt: I love that idea. I have to make one tiny point in between, talking about Bitcoin ownership and what it means to own Bitcoin; because at the end of the day, we're always asking the question, "Who owns the Bitcoins in this payment channel?" So, in general what we say is, "Not your keys, not your coins"; that's Andreas's statement. That means that if I have my keys, I own these Bitcoins. But what happens if Andreas has the same keys? Who owns the Bitcoins now? I'm not talking legally, I'm talking technically. Andreas can spend them and I can spend them. So, whoever spends them first is basically owning them. I would say owning means that you have control to move the funds or you have control over your Bitcoins.
That being said, what I could do is I could go out and say, "Hey, I create a multi-signature wallet". I go to Andreas and say, "Andreas, do you want to open a payment channel with me?"
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yes, I do, René. But in order to make sure that we don't get into trouble, I'd like these funds to be secured by multi-signature which requires both of our signatures, a two of two where there are two possible signers, you and me, and it requires both of our signatures to spend any money. So, here's my public key' maybe you can make one.
René Pickhardt: Okay, great. So, what happens now is because I know Andreas's public key and I can use a key that I generated, I can create this multi-signature address and I could basically send Bitcoin to this multi-signature address, just like a regular Bitcoin transaction. Now, comes a problem. Who owns these Bitcoins in this multi-signature address? Who can move them right now after I sent them there, after I published a transaction to the Bitcoin network and said, "Hey, I sent the funds there"?
Andreas Antonopoulos: The consensus of the two of us owns this Bitcoin.
René Pickhardt: Exactly, right. I don't own these Bitcoins anymore and Andreas doesn't own these Bitcoins. Only Andreas and I own them together. Of course, what we want to do on the Lightning Network is we don't want to trust each other, right. So, I'm happy to send Bitcoins to this multi-signature wallet, because that's really what's securing the channel, but I don't want to trust Andreas. So, what I'm going to do is I'm preparing another transaction that sends all those Bitcoins back to myself and I'm asking Andreas, "Can you please sign this transaction for me?"
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay, so this feels a bit like a prenup agreement. What we're doing here is we're entering this financial relationship where we will have joint but inseparable ownership of these coins. What you're saying is, you want to ensure that if I disappear or become difficult to deal with or disagree, I can't blackmail you. So, you're asking me to sign a refund of let's say your 100,000 satoshis that you're going to put this into this multisig, but before you've actually put it into this multisig? I mean, I guess so, It's no skin off my back, I can sign the refund because it's your money anyway and all I'm doing is proving that I can be trusted. So yeah, sure I'll sign the refund.
René Pickhardt: All right.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Does that make you feel more comfortable now?
René Pickhardt: It makes me ridiculously comfortable! Because what happens now is I can send the Bitcoins to this multisig address. You cannot move them, because you would need a signature from me. I can move them back to myself and they are my Bitcoins, right.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Because you have the refund transaction.
René Pickhardt: Because I have your pre-signed refund transaction.
Andreas Antonopoulos: But you haven't broadcast either of these transactions yet, you're just holding them. Because you're holding the refund transaction, do you feel comfortable broadcasting the funding transaction now?
René Pickhardt: Yes and no. For now, I would feel comfortable, because what I can do is I just move basically the coins to a different address, but I still control them.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay.
René Pickhardt: That makes me happy.
Andreas Antonopoulos: I'm watching the blockchain. I've just noticed that 100,000 satoshis has been deposited to this multisig that we co-own. I guess that's our payment channel, that's the anchor. I just saw it broadcast, it's been confirmed six times; we now have a 100,000-satoshi payment channel. Of course, you put in the money, so effectively since you have the refund transaction, you own all 100,000 satoshis. So, I've got a T-shirt to sell you for 20,000 satoshis. Would you like to buy it?
René Pickhardt: Sure, but how can I do that?
Andreas Antonopoulos: Well, how about we make a new transaction and then this one, we take the multisig and instead of spending it all back to you, you spend 20,000 to me and 80,000 to you. That way, effectively, 20,000 has moved to my side of the channel.
René Pickhardt: Okay, that's great. I will do that and I will take the shirt. I'm very happy. Do you know what I'm then doing? I'm being an asshole. I'm publishing the other transaction that you signed before. Remember, I still have my refund transaction that sends everything back to me?
Andreas Antonopoulos: I don't really like that. I'd like you to destroy that refund transaction before I agree to this new payment and give you the T-shirt. How can we destroy a Bitcoin transaction if Bitcoin transactions don't expire?
René Pickhardt: I think what we could do is, we could have changed the refund transaction initially. We could have given you the chance that if I publish this transaction later, you could claim the funds that actually belong to me, because Bitcoin has this cryptic language and it's smart and it's programmable. I could basically give you a certain time window of, let's say, a day or two.
Andreas Antonopoulos: I like this idea. If you give me a key that allows me to take all 100,000 satoshis if you tried to cheat, then I would consider that old refund transaction effectively revoked; because if you go publish it, you can't take your money for two days and in those two days, I can come in and swoop and take all of it. So, once you give me that key, I'm happy to sign the new transaction that says that I own 20,000 and you own 80,000. I think we've moved our channel forward by one step.
René Pickhardt: Yes. The only other thing that we need to do is we need to prepare such a similar key for the 20,000 satoshi I will put in case you want to pay me another time, next time.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay. So, basically what we're doing is we're making each of our commitments revokable by putting a key that can cause a penalty; asymmetric so that each of us has a delay in claiming our own money; and delayed by a couple of days so that the other person has an opportunity to penalise us if we try to cheat. I think now we can just keep moving the channel forward and moving money back and forth.
René Pickhardt: It seems like a ridiculously good deal, because now we can --
Andreas Antonopoulos: Hang on a second. I want to send some money to Peter but I don't have a channel with Peter. I want to send Peter 10,000 satoshis.
Peter McCormack: I've got a channel with René.
René Pickhardt: That's awesome.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay. So, how about I send you 10,000 satoshi, René, as long as you agree to send Peter 10,000 satoshi?
René Pickhardt: You could do that, but I would argue, "Please send me 10,100 satoshis" because honestly, for my time and effort to negotiate with Peter, I should get compensated. So, please send me a little bit more. If you agree to that, I will forward 10,000 satoshis to Peter.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay. But how do I know you won't just keep my 10,100 satoshis and never give anything to Peter? Maybe I need some way to prove that Peter got paid. Hey Peter, can you tell me the hash of the secret that will prove that you got paid?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I'm not going to tell René the secret.
Andreas Antonopoulos: You're not going to tell me the secret either. I just need a hash that proves in the future.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'll give you a hash.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Great, okay. So, here you go René. I'll give you 10,100 satoshis if you tell me the secret behind this hash. You don't know it; you're going to have to get it from Peter. Once you get it from Peter, I know you've paid Peter, so we're cool. Then you can claim.
René Pickhardt: Just to make sure what we did right now. So, we have our channel and there are 80,000 satoshis on my side, 20,000 satoshis on your side. You're basically saying, "Hey, let's create a third output" where you decrease the 20,000 satoshis that you owned and the third output, you can reclaim it later if I can't provide you with the secret or I can reclaim it if I know the secret. Is that correct; am I talking the right thing?
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, sure. Okay, that sounds like a good commitment to make. So, I'll sign that commitment if you revoke the previous one.
René Pickhardt: Sure. Yeah, of course.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Okay, great. Let's move our channel forward; let's see if we can make this work. I'll just wait and see what happens.
René Pickhardt: Okay. So, what is important to note here, I don't take any risk in this. Andreas is just reducing his money a little bit and he bets on the fact that I'm acting faithfully here. Now I have this contract with Andreas that I can claim the money if I know the secret that you came up with, Peter. So, what we're doing is we're doing the exact same contract in our channel. I'm setting up something. I'm saying, "Hey, you can claim this on your address with 10,000 satoshis if you provide me that secret, and I will only move the state forward if you share that secret with me".
Peter McCormack: It's a pretty good secret.
René Pickhardt: But you get 10,000 satoshis for it.
Peter McCormack: Okay. Well listen, just don't tell anyone else.
René Pickhardt: All right. I can't guarantee that to you.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know. But listen. Look, this role play is amazing. I think what you've done with this role play is that you've explained the logic behind the engineering of how this all works. At the same time, when somebody is using their debit card, they don't have to know what the logic is behind how the system works, how people get paid. They just swipe their card and they have an amount of money deducted from their bank's ledger and that goes to the retailer's bank account.
Moving across to using the Lightning Network, a lot of people want something similar that they don't have to think about all of this logic. I think it's really useful, but in terms of the actual users themselves, let's actually break down; because most of this, they don't actually have to know about. A lot of this just happens, which is great.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah. It would be a lot simpler in real life. Basically, "Hey, Peter, I want to pay you 10,000 satoshis. Can you give me an invoice?" and you generate an invoice. What that invoice contains is the destination, your Lightning wallet, which is a bit like an address, and it contains a hash of the secret. I don't see any of that; my wallet sees that. What that hash of the secret allows me to do is set up that chain of payments through however many hops it takes.
You've got to think about it in terms of in the Lightning Network now, with thousands of nodes connected with tens of thousands of channels, we're talking six degrees of Kevin Bacon, which is probably a reference that ages me a bit! But basically, the idea is that not only is there a path between me and you, Peter, but likely on the Lightning Network there are thousands of possible paths limited only by their length that could get me to you. Just like when you're navigating a map in the city and I'm in one place and I want to get to another, the number of roads and paths I could pick to get to that destination is explosively complex. But all I need is one that gets me there.
Peter McCormack: I think of a Lightning Network almost like a spider web.
Andreas Antonopoulos: It is.
Peter McCormack: I could be one point on the spider web and you can be another point and René, and there could be hundreds of thousands of other people. When I send a payment from myself to one other person, then the Lightning Network is just trying to find the fastest, best way to get there with the right amount of liquidity.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Interestingly enough, it's not the Lightning Network that does that, it's my wallet.
Peter McCormack: True, yeah.
Andreas Antonopoulos: My wallet and this is for privacy: if everybody was involved in getting the payment to you, Peter, everybody would know exactly where it came from and where it's going, which isn't so good for privacy. So instead, what happens is my wallet says, "I have this invoice to pay Peter. I've been listening to the Lightning Network gossip about all of these channels, so I can build an image of this spider web in my own Lightning wallet and I can find a way to connect these all together. I'm not entirely sure about the balances, but this path looks possible. So, let me just try shooting one of these promises through that path and see if it reaches Peter. If it does, the secret is going to flow back to me and I'll know that Peter was paid". And that's what my wallet is going to do.
The interesting thing is that every point on the path only knows the one before and the one after. It doesn't know how long the path is; it doesn't know who sent it; and it doesn't know who the ultimate recipient is because it can't tell. That's called onion routing. That gives us a great degree of privacy, because each person only deals with their channel partners, the channels they're connected to immediately. Beyond that, we don't know if things are coming or going, belonging to our channel partners, or if our channel partners are simply forwarding for someone else. That's a big part of the privacy.
So yes, in terms of the experience, I would scan your invoice and I would hit send. Behind the scenes, my wallet would find a plausible path. It would then construct a multi-layered, encrypted message that would be unwrapped by each person on that path and all they would see inside is the instructions on where to go next. They don't know where it's coming from, they don't know where it's finally going; all they see is, "Just forward this one more step to this node".
Eventually, it reaches you and a secret flows backwards in the same way. Nobody in between knows where it came from or where it went. But everybody made the same kind of deal, "If you give me 10,100 on the way in, I'm happy to pay 10,000 on the way out because I'm going to earn the difference". I might end up paying 10,800 for 7 hops, knowing that every person in between will take 100 satoshis and you'll end up with the 10,000 at the end. And no one will actually know how long the path is, who's involved or any of that information.
Peter McCormack: Let me ask you something, Andreas. If I send you some Bitcoin on the basechain, we know we have that Bitcoin I sent using -- basically, you can send an unspent transaction output. We know those bastards over at Chainalysis and similar cretin companies are able to track most of this, unless you're somebody who's very experienced in privacy or using some form of CoinJoin, which I'm not. We even know with some of that, that it can be recognised.
So, what's happening with the Lightning Network? If I am sending you sats, what is being sent across? How is that record of those sats being kept if we're not using UTXOs?
Andreas Antonopoulos: All that's being sent across is new commitments for the shared payment channel between each of the partners. There is no actual money being moved; it's just the changing balance in the channels involved. Eventually, one of your incoming channels, Peter, will have 10,000 satoshis more on your side owed to you with a signed commitment transaction. Now, you can either send that back out to pay someone else or, if you want, you could close the channel, commit that to the Bitcoin blockchain and you'll have a UTXO with at least 10,000 in it from that payment. But you don't have to do that, in fact, you don't want to do that, you want to keep it in the Lightning Network so you can continue making payments out. But once 10,000 is on your end, you can send it out.
Now, look at it from the perspective of an analytics company, none of this hits the chain. The initial funding transaction for the channels looks like a payment to a Bitcoin address which is a script address. You don't know it's a multisig. The closing transaction, if you end up closing the channel, will reveal it as a Lightning channel.
René Pickhardt: Not after Taproot. Sorry, you wanted to say?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, we'll come to that.
Andreas Antonopoulos: However, all you'll see is the final state. You'll see that I have 10,000 and René has 90,000, but you won't know how we arrived at that final state. In between, we may have sent back and forth thousands of transactions and payments on behalf of others or for ourselves. You'll just see the final reckoning, the final reconciliation. And you don't need to close the channels, so why do that?
Then there's the other magic which, as René mentioned, is Taproot. With Taproot, all of this appears as a single payment and then it looks like someone sent René 90,000 and me 10,000 and you have no idea that it was a Lightning channel and not just the payments. The Lightning Network just looks like another payer of a simple payment transaction; you don't see any of the scripts.
This is an enormous improvement in privacy. Everything happens within the context of a payment channel that only the two channel partners know about, or at least only the two channel partners know about the balance. Everybody else on the network doesn't know. Now, this is obviously the ideal description of what I'm saying. There are ways to probe this network and reveal channel balances, there are ways to interject nodes but in order to do that, you have to stake actual Bitcoin. So, it's a massive increase in privacy. Is it perfect? No, but we're not going for perfect. We're going for incrementally better and this is a massive step in the right direction.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, I do have some questions. The privacy side of things is incredible and that's amazing, especially one of the most important videos I've ever seen about privacy is one that you did, Andreas, which is on YouTube. I'll share it in the show notes. It's a fantastic video which talks about privacy as a human right. Having increased privacy with the Lightning Network is amazing, but one of the drawbacks at the moment or one of the restrictions at the moment is liquidity.
So, if I want to send you $1 million of Bitcoin, Andreas, on the basechain it's easy; I just do it and it goes straight to you, not a problem, you'll have it in six confirmations, maybe you'll wait for ten on that size. But on the Lightning Network, I obviously can't send you $1 million of Bitcoin just now. I can easily send you $10, $100 I'm pretty confident it will happen, but if we start getting to $200, $300, maybe $500, it starts to get a bit more complicated. Sometimes it fails, sometimes part payments. If we get into the thousands, it becomes even more difficult.
Where are we at with liquidity on the Lightning Network? What kind of progress is being made, and do you think we'll have to get to the point where maybe we've got some hubs which have very high levels of liquidity to be able to route some of these payments?
Andreas Antonopoulos: I'd like to pass this on to René by first interjecting something, which is the issue at first was channel liquidity. But as of almost a year ago, there is a technology on the Lightning Network called multi-path payments. Rather than trying to send this payment on one set of channels, on one path, now what we can do is we can break it up into smaller chunks and send these chunks on different paths through different channels. As long as we can add them all up and make the amounts we want to pay, that's great. These are atomic, meaning it either all happens or all doesn't happen, and they're trustless like every other Lightning payment.
Which then brings up another problem. How do you split them and which channels do you send them on? This is the basis, this question; this problem of finding the best possible paths is the basis of a massive breakthrough that René achieved with recent research that is a game-changer for the Lightning Network. It allows us to bridge the very small payments that are possible today with the very big payments that are only possible on chain and extend the Lightning Network through something that many of us are affectionally calling "Pickhardt payments" or "Pick-hard payments" because the maximalists love anything that says hard money in it.
René, can you describe approximately what you're doing with this pathfinding algorithm?
René Pickhardt: Sure. It's actually funny. You actually entered it very well by saying there's this question of how do you split optimally. When I started this work, I actually have a good repository that I will share soon that has this very boring title of We're Just Investigating How To Split This Optimally. That's what we were doing actually. It's a very boring math problem in the beginning. Once we were able to compute it and see the results, we were, "Wow, we can send all the Bitcoins that we have in our node to somebody else. It's unbelievable and it's fast and now I can send half a Bitcoin over the Lightning Network if I wanted to". We were flabbergasted. I remember doing this experiment for the very first time, jumping in my room and being, "This is incredible". Of course, in a simulated environment where we did this; I wouldn't play around novel research with half a Bitcoin on mainnet.
So, the idea behind this is the following, and Peter mentioned it very, very well. The larger the payment, the more unlikely the payment is to succeed. This is actually a very simple mathematical reason that we have actually explained in March this year publicly, but I think everybody knew this already. It's so simple, basically, that nobody from the research perspective actually talked about it. What has been described in the literature very often is that nodes have this success rate and the success rate drops when the payments get larger, exactly what Peter was basically describing.
What I was doing is, I was basically the first person to turn this around and say, "Look, we have this uncertainty". You mentioned before, Andreas, that you have millions of paths to choose to go to Peter. Which one should you choose? So far, what nodes usually did is they selected the one that offered the cheapest fees. That's reasonable, right? You want to save money. But what I'm saying is, "Hey, can we quantify the uncertainty of every channel in this path by using a probability theory and a probability function? Can we use that to optimise the path to have the most likely path to succeed or the most likely payment split, the most likely multi-path payment?"
Apparently, it turns out that this is a well-known study, it's a problem in logistics, it's 40 years old. Together with Stefan Richter, we have been able to transfer this back to this problem and it was just amazing. So, it's basically this idea of use this uncertainty. The main idea is actually, the larger the channel, very intuitively the more likely it is that you can use this channel. What you're basically trying to do is you find the right balance of small enough payments on many enough channels, because if you do all of the channels, then of course there is the likelihood that some of them are just unbalanced and don't work, even if you have very small payments. So, it's like this trade-off that you have to find there.
Andreas Antonopoulos: What's fascinating about this research result that really changed my perspective of the Lightning is that I thought that okay, maybe you split it into two or three channels. But in fact, what's interesting is that this works in a process of almost spraying the payment across the Lightning Network. For the bigger amounts that René simulated, close to half a Bitcoin, I think it was 0.42, or 0.420 if you prefer.
René Pickhardt: Yeah. So, what happened is we computed this thing and "spraying" is a nice word. We like to call it "flooding", because by the end of the day it's a flow problem. What we did is we computed this split and it was basically split this amount into 250 parts and use 250 different paths of very tiny amounts and send them over to Andreas or to somebody. When you do this MPP split and just send this out, 75% of the balance that we had in this experiment just arrived on the first attempt. Then some parts came back. What we did is we used all the information that we gained with the failing onions and with the successful onions and all of this to update our uncertainty, our belief about the network. Then we tried a second round.
Andreas Antonopoulos: To send the other 25%.
René Pickhardt: Exactly.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Effectively what you do is you squeeze as much as you can on the first try. Whatever doesn't go through, you squeeze on the second try. By the third try, you're down into the percentage points, base points.
René Pickhardt: Yeah. So, I only had to do this for four rounds in order to deliver a payment of size 0.4 Bitcoin on the Lightning Network. I don't think anybody has ever done this before, unless of course they had a really large channel where they had this direct connection and basically knew that they could send this back and forth.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Allow me to answer your question directly, Peter. You asked, "Will this mean that large hubs with large channels win?" The answer is large hubs with large channels obviously provide better opportunities for routing, but due to the ability to do multi-path payments, it actually makes more sense to open, with whatever balance you have, several channels to several nodes to become well-connected; because at the end of the day, you can aggregate all of the capacity across all of these channels to flood your payment across.
If you, say, had a half Bitcoin that you wanted to open Lightning channels with, it's much better to open 20 or 50 channels of one-fiftieth of that amount than open 2 big ones. It's not going to make you a major routing node but it's actually going to give you the best possible option for flooding across the network with this approach. I think the Lightning Network will develop to have a certain degree of hub and spoke architecture, but it will also have topologies that look more like a mesh and that serve communities that have particular affinity.
Think about the place you visited in El Salvador. They don't for the most part need to route outside of the cluster and the local topology. It makes much more sense for them to be well-interconnected in a mesh with a few larger channels going out for the occasional payment outside that cluster. I think that's what you're going to see. There will be backbones, there will be hubs; but they will serve the purpose of a backbone, they won't be serving the purpose of a centraliser. They will be bridging many smaller mesh-like topologies that represent people who spend money with each other often. It elevates community spending over global spending.
Peter McCormack: Right. René, this project, this thing you've been working on, was this the thing we had the discussion about that you're actually looking to go and work full time on?
René Pickhardt: Yeah, yeah. I have to be very clear. When we talk about these results, they are very early and preliminary results. What they demonstrate is that we want to think about this payment process and payment providing in this perspective. But, as I just mentioned, I wouldn't put half a Bitcoin in a very early-stage experiment on the Lightning Network. When you actually really want to engineer this, there is a lot of things to consider.
The questions that Andreas raised are there. It's how do nodes actually really provide the liquidity if they want to become routing nodes? If you're an end-user, probably like Andreas said, you just try to be well-connected with your friends and your local community. But if you're a service provider and those will also exist, like the more popular or bigger nodes, they have different needs.
Andreas Antonopoulos: It changes.
René Pickhardt: Yeah. Service provider exchange, whatever, right. They have different needs, so there are questions on that. For them, this method can actually also be used to bundle payments with a technique called trampoline payments. There's a lot of ongoing research and actual development to do this.
Once I discovered this, what happened is I basically put out a tweet and said, "Look, I did this experiment and it's amazing". Andreas retweeted it and was, "This is a game-changer" and many people contacted me, so I pretty much talked to everybody in the industry. You wouldn't believe how many people were offering NDAs and ridiculously high wages, shares in companies, all that stuff. I have to say every person has a price somewhere. I was very tempted to take one of these offers that was so much higher than any job offer or wage that ever was offered to me. But I thought long and hard about this.
By the end of the day, this technology is useful if everybody uses it and everybody knows this. So, a service provider could make use of this and have a competitive advantage and maybe do something like provide wallet services to exchanges who don't want to do this inhouse and so on. But I had the feeling if everybody in this open, decentralised, free network and free market know how people do pathfinding, that's just best for the network.
So, what I decided is to open source this thing. So, I will actually describe the mechanics of this in a paper and I hope to attract some funds in a fundraising project so that I can actually focus more on working on this and try to make this an open-source project that other wallets and implementations can start to use and start to commit to.
Peter McCormack: You're looking for funding basically to go out and you want people to respond to you, give you funding so you can go and work on this and make it open source?
René Pickhardt: Yeah, totally, totally.
Andreas Antonopoulos: I think we're running into very much the same issue that we ran into in 2013/14 with Core developers which is, if you want broad-based innovation that gets incorporated into a protocol that everyone can use, unencumbered by patents and open source, etc, we have to find ways to fund developers. Ironically, when that problem was solved by big companies sponsoring Core developers, that unleashed a wave of conspiracy theories about various shadow puppetry going on and, "Why is this company funding Core developers?", etc.
The bottom line is that if we want successful innovation in this industry, we can't expect it to happen in a vacuum. I think this is the kind of technology that will allow service providers, as René puts it, but more specifically exchanges, because one of the very first ways that an end-user will get a Lightning channel opened is if, when they withdraw from an exchange, they don't withdraw on chain, but instead they withdraw to a Lightning wallet through a channel opened by the exchange. That's the best possible way to do it. You're paying that fee anyway or the exchange is. It's much better to open channels to all of your customers and fund them adequately so that you can then become a bit of a hub at first, but also enable much faster payments.
In order to do that, these exchanges need to very much up their innovation and investment in the Lightning Network. It will pay off almost immediately, because it changes the transaction fee equation. If you look at the average exchange, they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a week in transaction fees. So, this is an investment worth making. I'm hoping to see in the next era of development of Bitcoin big service providers sponsoring with grants, or various other forms, Core developers in Lightning who can continue with this development in an open-source fashion.
I can run a Patreon. René has a Patreon too. But you shouldn't already have to be a popular influencer to be able to deliver open-source innovation; that shouldn't be the bar to be able to do this work. That requires a bit of change in perspective.
Peter McCormack: Listen. We spoke about this already, René. I'll donate €10,000 to you to get that kicked off, so that'll get you started and then we'll put it out there. People know this show. If people want to donate, how do they donate to you?
René Pickhardt: First of all, thank you very much. That's very generous and I think this is exactly what is being needed; that people actually put the money where their heart is or their mouth is and do this. They can go to my Patreon page. It's patreon.com/renepickhardt. I also have a domain running donate.ln.rene-pickhardt.de. I think you're probably going to link it on the show notes, because my last name is usually a little bit hard to spell. But, yeah, there will be a Bitcoin address and the possibility to also donate via Lightning.
Peter McCormack: Okay, well send me an invoice for €10,000; I'll get that paid, that's a start. We'll put this in the show notes to kick it off and also we'll put a tweet out there and we'll get this funded. It shouldn't take too long.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah, and I'd be happy to match that, of course, for this effort.
René Pickhardt: Wow, so both. Nice one.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Thank you so much, René. Here's a thing. When it comes to strange names, I want to also put out there that in this particular show, you have two of the three authors of our upcoming book. We're delivering that work again, as I've done in the past, and so has René and so has our co-author Olaoluwa, in an open-source format. So, the book is free to read as we write it, it's free to share and within this year, it will also be free to re-use commercially, mash up and do everything else you want under an open share-like creative common licence.
The three authors of this book are all unpronounceable: Andreas Antonopoulos, Olaoluwa Osuntokun and René Pickhardt. Now, the you know the two of us, we've already been introduced but I would be remiss if I didn't of course mention our good friend, Olaoluwa. Olaoluwa Osuntokun is the Chief Technology Officer of Lightning Labs, one of the leading companies in this space that has built LND, the Lightning Network Daemon, and has been a technology pioneer in this space, has written and invented many things that are used on the Lightning Network.
I couldn't be happier to have this dream team of authors going forward with this book, which we will finish by the end of July, if not for any other reason than my publisher has put a wall of a deadline and threatened me if I don't.
Peter McCormack: That's the Avengers of Lightning people to put this book together. I think we should also mention Olaoluwa is the fastest speaker in the world.
Andreas Antonopoulos: That is true.
René Pickhardt: I have to say one thing, please allow me. This is actually one of the other reasons why I decided to do it in the open-knowledge, open-source way. All the stuff that I'm working on is built on the shoulders of giants. I joined this space in 2018. I didn't invent the Lightning Network. When I saw this technology, I thought it was just beautiful. Those people kept that stuff as open-source software. But I didn't have the means to tip them and say, "Hey, thank you".
But me basically bringing my knowledge back and saying, "Look, I open source this" that's my contribution. So, that's a huge part of the motivation to actually say, "Hey, this is giving back to the community". People like Olaoluwa and I could probably name 20 other people or even more have done such an amazing work to build this technology and think of the possibilities. It's incredible.
Peter McCormack: We all stand on the shoulders of giants. My podcast only happens because I get very smart people willing to give me some of their time every week to ask my dumb questions and I'm lucky that sponsors want to pay for this. So, I'm always happy to contribute; everyone does in Bitcoin. This is the great thing.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think we'll get you funded, I think that's going to be very easy. Hopefully, you'll get funded to a higher level than those jobs that you were offered, which I think would be super awesome. But I commend you for making open source.
Andreas Antonopoulos: I had no idea you reached almost 100,000 people with every single episode, Peter.
Peter McCormack: No, that's not every one; it ranges. The range now is quite broad. It can be as low as 40,000. The one I just did with President Bukele is at about 165,000.
Andreas Antonopoulos: That's still an astonishing number. Would it be premature to call you the Joe Rogan of Bedford?
Peter McCormack: No, do you know what? I actually say Joe Rogan is the Pete McCormack of everything not Bitcoin!
Andreas Antonopoulos: Fair enough, fair enough.
Peter McCormack: Hey, listen look, I admire him a lot. I don't know if I've ever told people this, but I spent a lot of time studying his interviewing technique; not just listening to his interviews, but watching how he does it, how he holds conversations and I haven't managed to match him. But I do admire that guy a lot.
Look, between us all, and Andreas you've done a lot for me; Andreas, by the way, my first interview I did with you was the first one that actually went over 100,000. But we recorded that about three years ago and it took me about another two and a half years to get another one that high.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Wow. I'm so glad to break records with you, Peter. It's been an awesome collaboration.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I appreciate both of you, everything you've done.
René Pickhardt: Peter, by the way, you know your special role in my breakthrough, right? You're aware of that? I told you.
Peter McCormack: Yes, because of Peter Rizun, right?
René Pickhardt: Yeah, off this show. In this two years ago Lightning week, you also invited critics of Lightning and he was talking about, "Yeah, this pathfinding problem, it's unsolvable" kind of things, I don't know exactly. I was, "I don't believe that". It was xkcd comic of, "I can't come to you. There's somebody wrong on the internet", and basically two years or work -- I mean, I had started on these questions before, but that was a huge motivation for me to actually say. What I wanted to say is, it's your interviewing technique that makes it so intriguing to listen to the show.
Peter McCormack: Come on!
René Pickhardt: You invite all those people into going -- no, honestly it's entertaining and it's nice and it's good ideas; it's really amazing. This is what I love about Bitcoin. It brings together so many different people with so many different perspectives. It's amazing.
Peter McCormack: Well, listen. We've all patted each other on the back enough here. I do love you both and we've just got you €20,000 which is a good kick start for your project.
René Pickhardt: It's amazing.
Peter McCormack: We will get it out there; we will get you a lot more in donations; we will make sure this work is done. Anything we didn't cover that you want to cover, or are you both happy with this?
Andreas Antonopoulos: I think this was a great start, but we're going to have to go into more depth about this technology. There's so much more right under the surface. We've basically covered the basics. I really liked the way we role-played out payment channels. I think that's probably the first time I've done that on a show and hopefully it will become one of the foundational and seminal pieces of work in that space. Yeah, back for more hopefully soon.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I think we're doing another one where we're going to be talking about living on Bitcoin, which I think will be a fascinating one, because I get asked about that a lot. I've covered it twice. I've covered it with Max Hillebrand and I covered it also with that Didi guy, I can't remember his surname. People ask about it a lot. I think especially at times like now, a lot of people are thinking, "Hold on. If I've got enough Bitcoin, can I just be a nomad and travel the world and nobody will really know who I am and live my life on Bitcoin?" So, we're going to cover that as well.
But I appreciate you both. Everything we covered will be in the show notes: the open-source chapters of the books, your links, your Patreons and yeah, we will make sure we get the voice out there for you, René, to make sure you get funded. So, thank you both. I appreciate this.
René Pickhardt: Thank you.
Andreas Antonopoulos: Thank you, Peter. Have a great one. Bye bye.
