WBD554 Audio Transcription

Building on Lightning with Ben Arc

Release date: Wednesday 14th September

Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Ben Arc. 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.

Ben Arc is a free open-source software advocate and founder of LNbits. In this interview, we discuss how LNbits helps to decentralize custodianship and how Bitcoin’s widescale utility outweighs the environmental FUD.

“If you decentralise custodianship, if you make being a custodian very, very easy, it makes a mockery of laws restricting people from being custodians; if you’ve just got a few big operators, they’re points of failure which can be attacked by government or whatever. I think you see that with technology if you make things easier to run, more people are going to collectively challenge those regulations and those rules.”

— Ben Arc

Interview Transcription

Peter McCormack: Ben.

Ben Arc: Peter.

Peter McCormack: How are you, man?

Ben Arc: Very good, I'm a bit concerned because Chucky was on the table a moment ago, and now he's up there, and I didn't see anyone move him.

Peter McCormack: I don't feel like I should tell this story again, should I?  Fuck off, Danny.  I don’t feel I should tell this story, there's multiple things going on.  Me and Danny have just made a bet, 0.1 Bitcoin, that I can't give up vaping; I've got till the end of the year.

Ben Arc: You're going to lose.

Danny Knowles: I'm going to start vaping just to…

Peter McCormack: That is such a piss take.

Danny Knowles: It's just to tempt you.

Ben Arc: Can I get on with that as well?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: Really?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, what do you want?

Danny Knowles: Oh no, you can't make it too much because then he'll do it!

Ben Arc: That's what you want.

Peter McCormack: Right, I'll take you up on another 0.1 Bitcoin.

Ben Arc: Oh, fuck.

Danny Knowles: Ben, you're undermining me.

Ben Arc: No, we're all going to profit from this.

Peter McCormack: This is for the future of What Bitcoin Did.

Ben Arc: You can make a website and any audience member can -- 

Peter McCormack: You don't know how weak I am with this.  Dan does, and that's why he's taken the bet.

Ben Arc: I was an ex-smoker, so I feel your pain.

Peter McCormack: I did eight hours the other day and then I went into the shop to get gum, and when I was getting gum, they had the full vape counter.  I was like, "Oh bollocks, I'll get one more".  I told this story the other day, I'm just going to do the very quick version, because I told it to Anita.  It's really weird, I bought that as a present for my daughter.  She loves horror films, and I bought that as a toy in America and the weirdest things can happen.  If you know Child's Play, you'll get this.  When I bought him, he says two things.  We've had him for three months; about a week ago he started saying new things.

Ben Arc: Oh, Jesus!

Peter McCormack: I swear to you, he's got like eight new things he says, which completely freaks me out because that's Chucky, right.

Ben Arc: Maybe they did that on purpose, maybe they have it in the programming.

Peter McCormack: That's what I want to find out.

Ben Arc: Yeah, I think they probably do, because that's very clever if they do.

Peter McCormack: If they do that is brilliant, but we had him out the other day and we're like, "He hasn't said that before", and we're going, "He's learned like eight new things".

Ben Arc: Better keep an eye on him.

Peter McCormack: Anyway, good to see you again, man.

Ben Arc: Yeah, you too.

Peter McCormack: Thank you for coming to Bedford.

Ben Arc: No, thank you for having me.  Lovely, beautiful place.  Congrats on the move as well.

Peter McCormack: Thank you.  It's nice to actually be able to run the show here for a while and not always go to America.  I don't know what it is, but I feel like either there is a bit of a build-up of bitcoiners in the UK, or by doing the show here I've recognised there's more of a scene than I realised.  I now feel a bit of duty actually to help support it.

Ben Arc: Yeah, yeah.

Peter McCormack: I've supported enough of the Americans now; I feel like we should be doing more here.

Ben Arc: And Europe as well.  Well, you're having Anita on soon, but the German Bitcoin scene is incredible.  You just need to look at the node map to see how many Bitcoin nodes are running in Germany.  It's got the highest concentration I think, and it beats the US quite a lot of times for people running nodes.  Europe's got a great Bitcoin scene.  In the UK, and I think I might have said in your last show, that we had a positive news cycle for Bitcoin quite early on; whereas in the US they had, "This is drug dealer money". 

We had some BBC tech correspondents saying, "Oh there's this new thing called Bitcoin", and speaking quite positively about it, or not negatively at least, so I think people have been aware.  Of course, we've had some people who have been involved in Bitcoin very early on, someone like Adam Back.  Was he in Kent University when the Bitcoin thing was kicking off?  I think it was Kent University, cypherpunking away in his free time.  We have a good tradition with Bitcoin in the UK.  Meetups, we have a big meetup in Cardiff actually.

Peter McCormack: You do?

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When is it?

Ben Arc: I think it's the first Monday of the month or something.

Peter McCormack: When's the next one.

Ben Arc: I need to make sure.

Peter McCormack: Send me an invite, I'll try and get down to it.

Ben Arc: Dude, do, because we have a good turnout, and they also organise the Bitcoin Retreat as well, the camp event in West Wales, which is getting really popular.

Peter McCormack: I wonder if that's that guy I met.  I met some guys, some Welsh guys in Bitcoin, I wonder if he's involved.

Ben Arc: Probably, yeah.

Peter McCormack: Let me know, you've come down here so only right I should go back.

Ben Arc: Yeah, will do, that'll be great.

Peter McCormack: There's a guy who runs a meetup in -- who was the guy we met?

Danny Knowles: The Avon Valley guy?

Peter McCormack: No Leamington Spa.

Danny Knowles: Oh right, yeah.

Peter McCormack: He said, "I ran a meetup.  The first I did, I had one", but then he had more and it's growing.  We just had our first one at the Football Club, which was incredible.  We've obviously got people coming to a game, they know the club's a little bit about Bitcoin, so we look to leverage that, but we had over 60 for the first one.  I would say probably about 30 of them were bitcoiners and they came and learned a little bit about football.  The rest were football people who came to learn about Bitcoin and there was this really nice mix of people in the room. 

Conor Okus ran the session and he's so brilliant.  He would put questions out and you would see the discussion as the audience responds between them.  So you would have maybe somebody who's not exposed to Bitcoin ask a question, and then somebody in the crowd would answer, and it was this really nice mix.  We're going to do one a month at a home game and see how big we can grow that.

Ben Arc: I've got infinite respect for people who organise meetups, it's a lot of work and often they don't get enough credit for the great work they do.  Bitcoin wouldn't be anywhere if it weren't for its meetups.  A lot of the best things came out of meetups.

Peter McCormack: I definitely want to help support the UK scene if I can.

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: We can't let the Americans have all the fun!  So, last time we met, you briefly talked about LNbits and before we get into the meat of today, I think it'd be good to tell a little more; tell the audience about it, what you're working on because it's some pretty cool stuff.  I know Danny's a massive fan as well.

Ben Arc: It's very relevant to the topics which we're going to be covering today; partly I think what we're going to cover is bitcoiners looking at areas which historically have been blacklisted; so something like custodianship, what are better forms of custodianship, and can we make good solutions for people to be able to run themselves?

With LNbits, one of the original concepts -- it came out of a bunch of concepts and problems which we were having with Lightning at the time and paying in Bitcoin on Lightning.  One of them was that, if you decentralise custodianship, if you make being a custodian very, very easy, it makes a mockery of laws restricting people from being custodians.  If you've just got a few big operators, they're points of failure which can be attacked by government whatever, with regulations.

I think you see that with technology, if you make things easier to run, more people are going to collectively challenge those regulations and those rules.  With Lightning, for example, and Lightning solutions, quite often an Uncle Jim model, where you have a family member running a node, keeping channels, balancing channels, and then people in the family being able to use that node for their Bitcoin payment services, that's a nice model rather than everyone in the family having their own node.  So, with LNbits there was that concept of making it really easy to run an OpenNode or an LNPay, which are both fantastic, great services and a big shoutout to both of them, because they were massively inspirational to LNbits starting.

There was that and then there was some real-world stumbling blocks, where if I was developing something like a point of sale, I was playing around with hardware at the time, with microcontrollers and things, trying to make Lightning points of sale, I'd have to make six different versions. I'd need to make a c-Lightning version, an LND version and a cloud version, an LNPay version; they've all got their own different APIs.

What I needed was something which could sit on any funding source, then it would just have a standard API, so I could just develop, if I had that piece of software, I could just then develop for that API and then that piece of software could communicate with whatever's underneath it.  I wouldn’t have to keep having all these different versions of my projects, so there was that.

The other one was, I'd made an ATM at the time and all those funding source solutions, it was near impossible, apart from maybe LndHUB, to have multiple accounts.  So if you had a Lightning node you had one account, one admin.macaroon; if you had OpenNode, you had one admin key.  And if I'd got my ATM and it's got the ability to spend funds, to pay people, then if someone breaks into it, they can get my admin keys and they can take all my funds.  So, I wanted the ability to easily make lots of wallets as well, for it to be trivial, and each wallet has its own API keys.

These are developing for real-world issues I was having when I was trying to develop.  I think that's probably the best way to build things, because then there's other people like you out there in the world, and there was.  That's what attracted a lot of them, because I'm not a developer or anything.  I develop, but I was a teacher, I was learning while I was building this thing.  But thank goodness the project attracted all this incredible talent into it.  As a free open-source project, they were contributing, and quite quickly were able to build a piece of software which was very functional.

The other thing we wanted was the ability to have extensions.  If you imagine your Lightning node, LNbits, one of the good ways of describing it is like a WordPress for your node.  Depending on what you are and what you're using your node for, you have different requirements and different needs.  If you're a content creator, then you might want some extensions for helping you create contents, like putting QR codes and video streams or whatever; whereas if you're a shop, then you might want a point of sale or you might want an online shop or online integrations.  So, you have these different extensions and you can build out your node in any direction which is relevant to you.

There were lots of us, we were building cool little Lightning software projects.  A guy at one of the Lightning Conferences, for the hackathon he made a jukebox piece of software which was using Spotify's API.  You could connect to a page and then it would list some songs from a playlist he selected.  Then you could pick a song, and then pay, and then it would play on a device connected to that Spotify, so you had a cool jukebox thing which you could pay Lightning payments for.  A great project, but in order to run it you would have to go to his repo, you'd have to download and run his software in whichever way he's doing that.

So that's the sort of thing which is now an extension on LNbits.  Got in contact with him and he's fully accredited in there for having the idea originally, but as an extension of LNbits it's easier then for more people to have access to it, so LNbits to install it, you can install it from the repo.  For a lot of people, they run like a RaspiBlitz or a myNode or an Umbrel.  On those systems, it's just a one-click install and then you get access to all that functionality, so it makes that software available to more people easier.  So, yeah, the extension thing was also very important. 

It's benefitted me, like I've built a piece of software, or started a piece of software, which I wanted to be able to use and now I'm using it more and more with my hardware.  So, I have some hardware stuff here for you, which I was going to give you.

Peter McCormack: Oh wow, this is exciting.  I love it when people bring gifts.  Is this a bomb?

Ben Arc: Here's a bomb, yeah, which I've smuggled through customs!  In the UK, we have pre-archaic ATM laws, Bitcoin ATM laws, so the idea is if you have an ATM in your cafe or bar, can you make it cheap enough that if someone comes in and takes it from you, you can just deny all association to it and say, "Whatever, take it, it's not mine".  So, this is like £60 or something to make, and it's very reliable and works really quite well.

Peter McCormack: Come on, this is an ATM?

Ben Arc: Yeah, a Lightning ATM, so you can put coins in and then it will just display and then you're able to withdraw.  The actual project itself, you can also include a bill acceptor.  There's a great British company actually, called Innovative Technology and they make this amazing bill acceptor.  Originally with these projects, we had lots of lots of wires and soldering and things like that.  The microcontroller I'm using is the ESP32 and it's got a built-in screen.  Now, the screen has the microcontroller and everything built into it, and that's like a £15, £20 device, and we can just wire up the coin mech inside.

Peter McCormack: Are you selling these?

Ben Arc: We are actually with LNbits.  We are going to have a shop where we can sell some of this stuff, but really it's DIY, you can build it yourself.  This is like Lego, honestly, it's just a couple of jumper cables.

Peter McCormack: Does this work now?  Can we literally do something now?

Ben Arc: This is the thing, some of the wires popped out; I have got something working though.  The idea was, can we have as an onboarding thing, can we have an ATM, a point of sale, and a hardware wallet, all DIY which you can build yourself or someone else can build for you, and then can we have those for £100 for the lot?  This is that, so this is like £20, this is £60 so it's under £100.  This is £8, this hardware wallet.  This uses the same microcontroller as the PoS.  They're all ESP32-based microcontrollers.

Danny Knowles: What does that mean?

Ben Arc: If you think about a Raspberry Pi, that's like a crap computer, and quite often people try and program on it, but it's a crap computer.  Do you need a crap computer?  Whereas often, what they want to do, they could use a microcontroller for.  A microcontroller just compiles a small script, it doesn't have a whole operating system like a Raspberry Pi would, it's much more specific and there's less of an attack vector.

Peter McCormack: Can I use that at my Football Club?

Ben Arc: Yes you could, and do you know what's great about it, it's completely offline.  So you don't need to connect to anything, so I'm not connected to your Wi-Fi, so I could turn him on and if I select the PoS option, which is that first one there -- it's in GBP because it's offline.

Peter McCormack: That's what I would want anyway.

Ben Arc: It's easier for the people in the bar.  If I put in a penny there, and if I press the little hashtag thing, I get my little QR code.  Have you got a wallet?  Do you want to pay it?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: This is like $15, $20 to make and a lot of people run workshops.  Actually right now, as we speak, Stadicus, the guy who came up the RaspiBolt, the first Raspberry Pi Lightning node, he's doing a workshop for this in Frankfurt, I think.

Peter McCormack: What wallet will this go to?

Ben Arc: It's an LNURL Pay.

Peter McCormack: Can I use Muun?

Ben Arc: Muun's tricky with LNURLs, I wouldn't use Muun for LNURLs.  This is the only problem; try it, because they may have had an update for LNURLs.

Peter McCormack: It says, "Receive Bitcoin or go back to send".

Ben Arc: Use another wallet.

Peter McCormack: I think it's the only one I've got.

Ben Arc: Maybe try a BlueWallet or a Simple Bitcoin wallet.

Peter McCormack: I switched to Muun.

Ben Arc: Muun are implementing the LNURL stuff, but it's tricky for them because they're completely non-custodial.

Peter McCormack: My BlueWallet has only got 9,019 sats on it.

Ben Arc: This is a penny, so this should totally work.

Peter McCormack: No, if it's a penny let me do it.

Ben Arc: Here we go.  What have you got, BlueWallet?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: Yeah, try it.

Peter McCormack: I like BlueWallet.  I like both of them actually, I like them all.

Ben Arc: Did you get a link; you should get a link back?

Peter McCormack: Legend.LNbits.

Ben Arc: Click on it.

Peter McCormack: Oh no, it did that.  Done, paid.

Ben Arc: Yeah, has it got a link you can open?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: Open the link.  Has it got a number on there?

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: What does it say?

Peter McCormack: 2289.

Ben Arc: So, if you click on the hashtag, what does it say?

Peter McCormack: 2289.

Ben Arc: What happened was, when we set that payment, it randomly generated a four-digit PIN, encrypted it, put it inside that QR code.  When you scanned it, you passed the encrypted PIN to the server.  The server then decrypted it when you made the payment and sent it back as a receipt.

Peter McCormack: Why do we need that PIN?

Ben Arc: So that's your proof of payment, because that PoS is offline, so there's no way for the person who's using that PoS to tell whether you've actually made the payment.  You could have a fake version of BlueWallet and actually the payment didn't go through, and you just faked it.

Peter McCormack: What wallet does this go to; where are those sats now?

Ben Arc: That's an interesting question.

Peter McCormack: Oh my God, this is one of my favourite shows ever.

Ben Arc: Danny, on the screen can you open that link up which I sent you, is that possible?

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: When did you put Jerome Powell up there?

Danny Knowles: Today.  He's fixed inflation, hasn't he?

Peter McCormack: So, we've retired Peter Schiff?  Hold on, is Schiff gone forever?

Danny Knowles: Probably not forever.

Ben Arc: With LNbits, you bookmark your wallet, it's like an Instawallet-type thing in the browser; so whoever's watching this now, they can scribble down the wallet and steal our funds, so it's not the best security for it.

Peter McCormack: Where can they steal it from?

Ben Arc: If they took the URL there, they could get to this wallet.

Peter McCormack: So there's no login.

Ben Arc: No. not currently.  It's funny, because people ask for it when they first start using LNbits and then we're like, "No, you just bookmark the page, it's like an Instawallet, just don't show anyone the URL".

Peter McCormack: Could I have this automatically just pay out to another wallet?

Ben Arc: Yeah, very good question.  We have an extension which does exactly that.  So, if we refresh this --

Peter McCormack: Do you know why this is cool, Danny?

Danny Knowles: There you go.

Ben Arc: See your PoS payment there for 51 sats.  This connects to the LNURL device, this is where you make the PoS, or you can make the ATM and you can also set a profit margin as well.

Peter McCormack: What do you mean profit margin?

Ben Arc: You can overcharge.  So that invoice, there was an extra 2% added on, so you can do that as a merchant if you want to rip your customers off a little bit.

Peter McCormack: Let me tell you why this is interesting, right.

Ben Arc: It gets more interesting but go on.

Peter McCormack: In terms of the football, so everything right now, I'm using the Football Club as a lens for how we use Bitcoin.  We have people who come to the game, who just want to pay with their pounds.  We've got three ways of paying: cash, card, Bitcoin.  We've got multiple payment points, we've got online pregame, at the gate when you turn up, in the clubhouse and the other day we went round the barbecue with Danny.

If you want to buy online at the moment and say you want to buy merchandise, it's great because Shopify is linked with OpenNode, it just all does it nicely for us.  If you want to buy match tickets, the company we work with has no integration, there's no possibility, so what we'd have to do, it's just annoying.  We're better of saying, "Just buy on the day".

In the Clubhouse, we have Zettle as our PoS for buying beers and stuff, and we also have an iPad with OpenNode already set up if you want to buy your beers or stuff with that.  But what we have is two other points where we collect money.  At the gate, when people arrive, they want to buy a ticket.  They don't have a ticket and they want to buy a ticket, and do they want to buy a programme; and we also have the barbecue.  Both of those points, we can't accept Bitcoin because we haven't got it set up, we just have the Zettle.  This would just make it super easy.

Ben Arc: Then also as well, so there's another function in here, so when I was in El Salvador I had dollars, I ran out of sats; I wanted to be able to go into a shop.  And one of those shops, they'd accumulated some sats hadn't they, and I wanted to be able to buy the sats back.  So, this also works as a meatbag ATM.  So, in lots of parts of the world if you actually go to an ATM, in somewhere like Nigeria or something, an ATM would be a dude with a machine and you do the card payment there and then.  So this is kind of quite standard in lots of parts of the developing world or parts of the world without a more established financial system.

Basically there's four options you can have on here, we've got two of them running at the moment.  We've got the PoS; so, if I go to the ATM, they'll ask me to put in a PIN, I'm going to put in a super-secret PIN, 878787, don't tell anyone.  Now, I'm going to put in an amount, so 2 pence.  Now watch this, because it's offline, so I just press the little hashtag, boom, it's generated the withdrawal link.  Now you can scan that with your BlueWallet, and you'll get 2 pence worth of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: How, if it's offline?

Ben Arc: It's constructed an LNURL withdrawal.  So the LNURL device there, you'll see that it has a secret key.  This is the software, basically, the server.  So, if you scan that.

Peter McCormack: Create invoice?

Ben Arc: Oh, yeah, that's that weird BlueWallet UI.  Actually a Simple Bitcoin wallet is probably the most perfect Lightning wallet, in my mind.

Peter McCormack: Simple?

Ben Arc: Simple Bitcoin Wallet, yeah, if you've got an android, it works really well.

Peter McCormack: By the way, things are slow here because our internet's slow.  Done.  ATM, I love that.

Danny Knowles: Look, there you go.

Ben Arc: There you are, now you see the payment on there.  I just sold you 2 pence worth.  So, what you could have, you could say, "Well, you haven't got any sats?  I'll tell you what, buy £10 worth of sats; and did you know, if you pay for your beer in there with sats, you get discount".  Then just suffer the loss, but then people have that experience of getting some Bitcoin, spending some Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: What I really like the idea of is this being at the club.

Ben Arc: Just on the door.

Peter McCormack: Can you just close that a second?  I almost want to have like a -- maybe I just print something out that says, "Download a wallet", we'd recommend a wallet, download it, put in your keys, scan it and done and this is like a fun way of someone to get their first sats.

Danny Knowles: Do you want to describe what it looks like for people listening.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, anyone who's listening and can't see this, firstly you should go and check out the YouTube, but basically Ben bought in something that is about the size of a shoebox, but it's like one of those old cases with the old number locks on; kind of also looks like a bomb!  But at the front of it is like an old slot machine.  It's basically like a gumball machine.  So, you can put your coins in and then there's a little screen.  What's the red button for?

Ben Arc: You can plug this in, but it's very low powered.  I have a 12-volt battery, battery pack, you can use that so you can swap the plug for the battery pack, and then this will just go to sleep every three minutes of being idle and then you can just go up to it and press the button and it will wake it up.  When it's idle, the battery, the 12-volt battery, will last years and that's not an exaggeration; it'll last years until someone presses that little button to wake it up.

Peter McCormack: I think we should have that at the club.

Danny Knowles: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Do you know what I think we should do, it depends if you're available, but the next meetup we have at the club for a home game, if you can, I think it would be cool if you came down and did some demos and we put that out there and we set all this up.

Ben Arc: As I said, there is a version as well which has a bill acceptor, so if you want a bill acceptor as well, it uses the same software, and the software just recognises that there's a bill acceptor plugged in.

Peter McCormack: What do you mean bill acceptor?

Ben Arc: Something you can put notes in.

Peter McCormack: Wow, definitely.

Ben Arc: I like being able to put this in any box, so Amazon have these Amazon basic safes, you can buy from Amazon.  I bought it and I thought it was going to be about this big and then this thing arrived and it's like this big.  So, it's quite a big safe, so it's a big black metal safe.  But actually, the metal's thin enough that I could angle-grind a few holes out of it, stick a screen in there, stick a coin mech, stick the bill acceptor and then you have an ATM.  The safe itself I think cost £60.

Peter McCormack: I want that, I would pay for that.  I'd want our logo on it.

Ben Arc: For all the electronics and the safe, you're talking probably £200 to make the whole thing.

Peter McCormack: I want it.

Ben Arc: It's mad, isn't it?  Let me show you something else.

Peter McCormack: Okay.

Ben Arc: If you go to "Manage extensions" on here.

Peter McCormack: Just a quick question, I have to provide the liquidity for it.

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: So on a Saturday, I'd probably want to put a few hundred pounds of sats in so people can use this?

Ben Arc: Yeah, what you can do is you can get a bit circular, can't you?  If you're accepting Bitcoin payments, you can have the ATM pull from the same wallet.  Then the ATM will just not work if it runs out of funds.

Danny Knowles: So, where do I go, sorry?

Ben Arc: If you go to manage extensions, and then you'll see all the extensions we have, we've got all sorts of craziness.  Scrub is the one, we won't click on it, but this is the kind of the one you were talking about here.  This is where you can give it an LNURL Pay or an LN address, and then any money which goes into this wallet will automatically get pushed out to that.  This is an acronym I'm trying to push, which is Scrub, so it's like a Semi-Custodial Remittance something Bitcoin.

If you go to TPoS and then open that one, I've already set up a point of sale for you here.  This is a software point of sale, so if you click on the little thing.

Peter McCormack: Where does it get its rate that it's selling the sats for?

Ben Arc: We have it in LNbits, it pulls the exchange rate from several different sources and then averages it, so it's pretty accurate.

Peter McCormack: Then if I wanted to, could I add, say, a transaction fee?

Ben Arc: Absolutely,  yeah.  There's a 10% for the ATM on that PoS there.

Peter McCormack: That's steep, dude.

Ben Arc: People are buying Bitcoin, it's fine.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: This here is a completely Airgap software point of sale, so if you click on the little thing where it says, "Bar", and it's got that little icon thing, if you click on that.  So, if you scanned that with your phone, in fact I'll do it right now.  I'll scan this just with a regular normal QR code scanner.  The idea is that you can print this out and put it on your bar or in your café, or whatever, and say, "If anyone wants to come in and pay in Bitcoin, scan this QR code --" I haven't got a signal so it's not going to work, "scan this QR code and you'll get this point of sale basically on your phone", and it's like mobile-ready and everything.  So if you close that.

We've got a great contributor actually recently who's started contributing to LNbits and he's added some nice functionality into this.  So, if you press a penny or two pennies or whatever, press OK.  It says, "Would you like a leave a tip?", so give a 10% tip.  Then there we are, if you pay that, Peter.  This is just my elaborate way of taking all your sats.

Peter McCormack: I like it, mate, you came all the way to Bedford to take 74 sats off me.

Ben Arc: It's a very elaborate scam.  It's important to remember this is a demo server which I'm running.  It's also custodial, so the funds are on our Lightning node, but the idea is that with LNbits, you can just run it yourself on your own node pretty easy if you've got like an Umbrel or a RaspiBlitz or something.  Paid?

Peter McCormack: It's scanning, it's the internet connection.  One thing with all this is great, but my accountant will be having a heart attack.

Ben Arc: There we are, so that paid.

Danny Knowles: So, if I go back in here.

Ben Arc: If you go to Bed FC, so he's got the Bed FC, so there's the sats and then the tips have gone into a different wallet.  When you set up the point of sale, you can send the tips to a different wallet.

Danny Knowles: So that could go to the barman.

Ben Arc: Could go to the barman and his wallet.

Peter McCormack: Or, can it be split?

Ben Arc: Basically any question you have, we have an answer for!

Peter McCormack: I love it!

Ben Arc: So, if you go to "Manage extensions", and if you go to, "Split payments", where is it?  Down there, if you enable that, this gets to be really interesting, particularly the side of me which is interested in cooperatives and things.  If you go down, scroll down again and then open up, "Split payments".  I think we need to work on the UI, but basically we've got that source wallet, see where it says, "Bed FC".

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: We need to work on this UI, but we will.  You can add in the wallet ID, give it an alias and then say, "Okay, 50% of whatever goes into Bed FC is now going to go to this wallet".

Peter McCormack: What I would want with this, we've got a squad of 20 players, put all 20 players in and then any tips just split between the team.

Ben Arc: Flippin ace, yeah do it, that'd be amazing.  If you go to, "Manage extensions", again.  Basically, with LNbits, it's a free and open-source project, we've all been contributing a few hours here, a few hours there.  Then obviously because it's so great, and people like it, we've had a lot of VC interest over it and they've been like, "Can you make a business?  Can we employ the people working on this to work on it full time?"

Then we're like, "Yeah, but what we don't want to do is that classic thing with a free and open-source project which is good, where they have like an enterprise version and then like a community version of the software and it sucks".  It's a crappy version and the good version which you have to pay for.

Peter McCormack: Then you feel obliged to work on the -- 

Ben Arc: Yeah, because you go for the big VC round and you promise all these things, all this functionality and yeah, it will be paid, etc.  We were talking to VCs for probably about a year and a half about LNbits and how we could like sync it in and do something with it.  Eventually, Max from Hivemind, he's a pretty progressive dude, I like him.  So, I went to him directly and I'm like, "Dude, undervalue us.  Just give us enough money to employ five of the developers working on LNbits right now, full time; because currently, we're just doing a few hours here and there, and then just see what happens in a year, a year and a half.  We're not going to guarantee we're going to produce any return on investment".

Peter McCormack: Give us money, yeah!

Ben Arc: It was basically like, "We probably will, so we have things we're going to make".  We're going to make the shop where we sell the gizmos and we're also going to have software to service, so you'll be able to go to LNbits.com and then just pay some sats.  Then we have like a Kubernetes cluster, and you just go and spin up an LNbits, like a throwaway LNbits, which is really interesting because you connect to your Tor server and do some fun stuff.

Peter McCormack: Do you know, it's making me think, we had Obi in the other day to talk about Fedimint.

Ben Arc: I love Obi.

Peter McCormack: We had a long conversation about VCs investing in Bitcoin.  And the traditional VC investment model is ten investments, eight go to shit, a couple do okay, but one should be a home run.  The thing we're doing with Bitcoin, if you invest in Bitcoin companies, your two in ten also have to outperform just holding Bitcoin, which is quite a challenge, so you've got to outperform Bitcoin.  He pointed me to that Daniel Krawisz, his article on Nakamoto Institute, which was speculative altruism.  I read about it, and he said a lot of Bitcoin investment really needs to be considered as altruism that may have a payback.

Ben Arc: Well, no, it's two-fold, because you may get a return back on your investment for the immediate thing which you're investing in, but what you are doing is you're building out the infrastructure.

Peter McCormack: You're making your Bitcoin worth more.

Ben Arc: Then you make your Bitcoin worth more, so you're increasing the value of your own bags.  Over the past couple of months, where I think four people or now five people have been working on LNbits full-time, it's amazing.  The repo's being managed properly, and we built out a massive testing suite, because we're still beta so we want to come out of beta right.

So, if you go to on-chain wallet here, open on-chain wallet.  Okay, so Vlad Stan, who's one of our developers, I originally got in contact with him because he worked on BitcoinJS.  I had a DIY hardware wallet, and I wanted him to help me build a front-end UI, like a Trezor-type thing, but web based; he did loads of work towards it, and this is a couple of years ago and I just didn't do that extra 10% to have the thing finished.  It was called The Little Bowser, the second version of My Bowser wallet thing.

When Max gave us the investment to employ some LNbits developers, I get in contact with Vlad Stan and I'm like, "Dude, can we make this thing now?  Can we make these cheap DIY hardware wallets and then in a way where we can use a browser with it?"  He's like, "Yeah, cool", he's between things so he joined us and honestly the things he's built, this dude's a genius.  So now, we have this DIY hardware wallet, that uses the same microcontroller as the PRS which is this TTGO, LilyGO, it's an ESP32 base microcontroller.  We've got a nice little printed box for it.  This is like £8, £9 to make this. 

It uses Web Serial, so if I plug this into the computer -- Web Serial works on Chrome, Chromium, I think it works on Brave as well; and then you see where the little Bluetooth symbol is there, if you click on that.  Yeah, so if you're using Chrome or something, it would come up with a little box where you could select this device, if it was plugged in via a USB.  Don't worry trying to get it up, it will be too faffy. 

Danny Knowles: All right.

Ben Arc: Then, you can login, and this has a private key so you can sign.  This thing can generate -- so, if you go to, "New payment", we don't need to be plugged in for this, we can put in a Bitcoin address there, we can put an amount in satoshis, and then we can generate a partially signed Bitcoin transaction which then we can send over the wire, Web Serial, to a hardware device, and then we can sign on that hardware device. 

I mean, it hasn't got HSM, it's not got a secure chip on, it's not your Trezor, but it's a hardware wallet which was cheap enough for me to be able to give to a café or a bar or something and say, "This is better than you storing your Bitcoin on a phone or on an exchange, and it's good for like £10,000, or something, but don't go any higher than that.  If you're going to go any higher than that, use something with a secure chip".

Peter McCormack: I think even at £10,000, you want a secure chip, right?

Ben Arc: Do you know what, in saying that, supply chain attacks are huge.  It scares me, I don’t want to FUD the world of hardware wallets, because I love all those projects and I love Trezor, but the factory which is making those hardware wallets, they know that they're hardware wallets and that's an issue.  They know there's probably going to probably going to be a substantial sum of money on those hardware wallets, so I'm constantly waiting for a supply chain attack to come to fruition.

Peter McCormack: How many people in that factory have to collude to fuck with the hardware wallets?

Ben Arc: It's whoever's boxing the things up, just slips in a corrupted hardware wallet which their mate made.  I know they test these things; they randomly do samples and test them.

Peter McCormack: How many have you got to slip in?  They're making millions of these.

Ben Arc: When do you activate the backdoor and how many of them -- it's something you just don't know it's an attack factor.  But these don't have the supply chain attack.

Peter McCormack: Why not?  You're the supply chain.

Ben Arc: If I was selling these from a shop, yeah of course, but if you do it DIY, you could buy this from Amazon, AliExpress, wherever; and the company which are selling them, they're just like, "It's another Arduino enthusiast".  They have no idea that you're anything related to Bitcoin.  Just not doxing your address, your delivery address for your hardware wallet, as we've seen with the ledger stuff, is a good thing.

So the idea is, we haven't got it here, but we've got another extension being built by this guy called DNI.  Now, I think most European, US café bar owners, when they accept Bitcoin payments, they want it as a way to try and accumulate Bitcoin, which if you do it on Lightning sucks, because then you spend it and you really want it in cold storage.  What we have is when you mix these extensions together -- an extension which is coming up very soon is a swap extension, so it can swap from Lightning to on-chain. 

What you can do is set a threshold in a wallet, say when it gets to £50 or £100 in this wallet, the satoshi equivalent, it will loop out using this extension, so it will just be listening and watching that wallet, so when it gets to £100, it will loop out to on-chain.  Then they can manage it from their $10 hardware wallet.  Or if they want, they could put an on-chain address from Kraken or some exchange or whatever and have the funds go there.

It's funny, because one of the first things which was built on Lightning was by Éclair, it's something called -- it was Acinq Strike actually, it's called Strike.  That was simply that Lightning payments go in, they concatenate together, and then you loop out to on-chain.  It was such a great product, and it's such a great thing.  So, we're going to have an extension which basically does that.  When you mix it with the point-of-sale extension, this hardware wallet extension as well, it becomes a very powerful tool set you can use.

Peter McCormack: Let me ask you something completely different.  You know Muun wallet, you don't know whether you're using Lightning or basechain when you make payments.

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: How the fuck does that work?

Ben Arc: I don't know, it's wizardry.  I mean, Muun wallet's incredible and they're trying to tackle -- the obvious problem is that Lightning doesn't work properly.

Peter McCormack: Okay, we'll come back to that.  I think they're solving another problem; you're having to think about two networks, basechain and Lightning.  So when we ran the meetup, we covered Bitcoin and then we covered the Lightning Network.  If you don't know any of this, that's a massive leap from one to the other, "I've got this Bitcoin to send to there, but I need to also use a Lightning Wallet to do quick --"  To get rid of that and just not have to think about it, you have Bitcoin, I think that's a great solution.

Ben Arc: I don't know.  Never underestimate how much people can scale up.  Think about the early internet and when people didn't know what email was and whatever else, and it all sounded very complicated.  Then people scale up and they learn all these things, so one day people understand and be able to operate and use daily public e-crypto.  It will happen, of course it will happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but I think if you compare it to the internet, there's two types of people.  There are some people who want Bitcoin who are going to want to have a wallet and a phone, and they're going to go, and they just want to go pay and forget about it.  Like the internet, there are some people who are going to not run a Mac or not going to run a PC, they're going to build their own computer, they're going to understand how it works and dig into it and care about it.  There's a variety of people.

Ben Arc: This is kind of the point, just to go back on ourselves a little bit; this is the point of why, as bitcoiners, they shouldn’t be scared or blacklist this area of custodianship, because there are people within a community who are a bit more technically competent and they're more likely to set up that server.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.

Ben Arc: You make it as easy as possible so as many people can be that person, but for the immediate and near-term future, it's certainly going to be that there's technically competent people are going to be the ones managing these nodes.  Also the ones with resources, because these nodes cost quite a lot of money to run, manage channels and all that sort of stuff.

Peter McCormack: There is a lot to think about, so let's compare it back to running the football club.  When we take payments on our website, all that happens is people select their card or PayPal and the money ends up in our bank account.  When people come to the ground and they buy a beer, they scan Zettle, and it ends up in our bank account.  That's all that we have to think about and then we have this pool of money in our bank account.

Ben Arc: This is like the Goldberg machine of all these crazy things happening in order for that process to happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, but with this, we've got OpenNode and there's sats on OpenNode; and then we also then put some of the sats back into our cold storage; but we can leave some in a float which is on a hardware wallet; then if we accept this, we have sats here.  There's a lot of disparate things that can be going on with Bitcoin.  There always is and I assume most people, when they think about how much Bitcoin they own, they don't just say, "I've got 12 Bitcoin".  They go, "I've got 2 Bitcoin there.  On that hardware wallet I've got another Bitcoin on my phone I've 100,000 sats in there".  There's a lot of disparate sources.

Ben Arc: This is why I quite like the idea of Scrub solutions, where you're just looping out to on-chain when it gets to a certain amount.

Peter McCormack: I like that.

Ben Arc: Then you can just use somebody else's service and your risk profile is, what, £100 which is going into that wallet and that's fine.  Maybe you have a pay a 1% or 2% transaction fee for them giving you that service.  So that's why I quite like it, for a way of onboarding for people; but I think that people will become accustomed to having cold-storage Bitcoin, which is secure on-chain, not saying Lightning isn't secure.  Then you have payment Bitcoin, which is your chequing account which you can use for payments, so your savings account and your chequing account.

Peter McCormack: And your Lightning Wallet.

Ben Arc: Your Lightning Wallet is your chequing account.

Peter McCormack: I think there's always three.  I think you have your cold storage on-chain, then you have your hardware wallet on-chain --

Ben Arc: I don't know, cold storage I'm saying hardware wallet.

Peter McCormack: I said multisig, so I think you have your multisig -- 

Ben Arc: That's going another level.

Peter McCormack: If you think in terms of a company that might have -- okay, a café is maybe different.  Say there's a company that's dealing in six, seven figures of Bitcoin.

Ben Arc: Then a multisig with a Trezor with a secure module, plus a device which doesn't have the supply chain attack, is the secret source right there.

Peter McCormack: You've got to be going some to supply-chain attack Ledger, Trezor and COLDCARD on a 3-of-5.

Ben Arc: I don't know, a few of them are using different secure modules, but I would like to have an off-the-shelf device, because then I know there's no supply chain attack and I can do a multisig.  I think this is the most important thing, is that you have different payment journeys for different users.  For someone in the UK, Europe, whatever, they want to accumulate Bitcoin, have it go to their Kraken account, have it go to a hardware wallet; for someone in El Salvador, they want maybe something a bit more circular; and then maybe we just use that Scrub extension just to send it to their Lightning wallet they've got on their phone and then just use it when they're going out and about.

This is actually why it's been great that we've had all this uptake from countries which haven't got more established financial systems, because we're having to then build and address some of the problems with this technology for users like that, such as it being incredibly expensive to run a Lightning node, for example.  For the average El Salvadoran, they don't have access to anything else than something which is custodial, because they can't do their own non-custodial Lightning payments, it's too expensive, too hard and they haven't got the internet coverage or whatever.

Peter McCormack: You came out with quite a controversial statement a moment ago.  You just said Lightning Network doesn't work; we're going to have to talk about that!

Ben Arc: The promise and the assumption is that everybody can build a node. 

Peter McCormack: I'm going to move this, just because I want to see your face!

Ben Arc: Like my gizmos, for example, the first gizmo I made was I went to a Lightning Hackday, and someone had made a sweet machine which had a full Bitcoin node in it and a Lightning node and then you would scan a QR code, you'd go to a website, you'd pay the QR code and then you could get it to sell sweets.

Peter McCormack: That was like my McDonald's experience in El Salvador.

Ben Arc: I thought McDonald's experience was quite good in El Salvador.

Peter McCormack: I thought Starbucks was way better.

Ben Arc: Really?  Did you go to the do-it-yourself thing?

Peter McCormack: I don't know if it's changed, so I went the day it happened.  I went into Starbucks and they immediately just gave me -- popped up a phone, scan and done.  Whereas with McDonald's, what was the issue?  I did it on the screen, then it popped up a QR code.  I can't remember what the issue was.  Was it that it gave me a Lightning address and I had a basechain, or maybe it gave me a basechain address, and I had a Lightning, and it didn't tell me which it was and I was assuming I was going to pay with Lightning.  Something was just not smooth; I can't remember what it was.

Ben Arc: When I was there for the conference, I went to McDonald's and again a shoutout to OpenNode; I was relieved when I went there, because I saw the mess with Athena and Shiba wallet stuff.  I was relieved when I went into McDonald's and then I saw this OpenNode thing and then the OpenNode Lightning invoice pop up, and then I paid it, and it went pretty well.  My wallet was actually slow; I did a little demo for people, my wallet ran slow so it made it look slow, but actually the OpenNode site was fast, and it worked.

It made me confident, and this is why they're such a great company, from the beginning of Lightning being set up, OpenNode was there, and it was offering a very professional service.  If you had a big corporate customer, like a McDonald's, who suddenly wanted to use Bitcoin or Lightning, they could speak to this company, speak to OpenNode and then they can build them a solution, which they did I thought in El Salvador.  Maybe I was there, maybe I did it a few days after you and they'd ironed out some bugs or something.

Peter McCormack: You know what, it might have been my own user error, probably was.

Ben Arc: It was a testament.  That's the best thing with OpenNode, it's so stable.  And if you have someone who doesn't care about KYC, and they just want to accumulate some sats and then for it to go out to a bank account or on-chain, then that's a great solution to point people towards.

Peter McCormack: OpenNode has done everything to help us with the football club and they have been brilliant.  We do it as a way for the club to accumulate sats, because when we're selling merchandise, I reckon 1 in 15 orders is people paying with Bitcoin.  So they have that option where you can choose to, say, keep 50% in fiat and 50% in Bitcoin.  It's such a low number of orders, we just keep all our Bitcoin orders in Bitcoin, we just leave them there.

In terms of structure though, what we do is we do have a multisig cold storage with the keys distributed amongst different people.  We then have what we call the float, which is just a single hardware wallet which carries a small amount of Bitcoin, but that is our float.  We had a ref who wanted to be paid in Bitcoin recently, so to pay him, so just that small amount.  And then what we have is all the different payment channels in Bitcoin that go into OpenNode.  The OpenNode stuff goes into the float, and once the float hits a certain threshold, we put that into cold storage.

Ben Arc: Sweet.

Peter McCormack: So, we're gradually accumulating Bitcoin as a club.  There are just these different things to keep an eye on.

Ben Arc: I feel I need to go back to qualifying my statement about Lightning being broken.  The promise was that everything would have a Lightning node in, like that point of sale would have a Lightning node in.  Everything would have Lightning nodes in, and it would all be non-custodial, and it'd be great and we'd easily be able to set up these channels and we'd have great network connectivity.  The reality is we have a lot of failed payments in Lightning.

Obviously, opening a channel requires an on-chain transaction which is quite expensive and it's tricky to manage and balance.  There's some great autopilot solutions which are being worked on, which are going to be very helpful.  CLBOSS is a good one for c-Lightning, it's a fantastic plug in.  You just give it on-chain and it just goes and makes Lightning channels, that's great; that sort of work needs to continue.  Also in the future, we'll have things like channel factories where we can have multiple channels set up on single transactions, that's cool too.  I think that comes out the Taproot stuff.

But this concept that everything would have a Lightning node in, it just hasn't happened yet.  Maybe it will, maybe it won't, I'm not sure.  And I think that what's interesting is from the ground, people are using and developing solutions on Lightning, like the Simple Bitcoin wallet.  People come up with solutions and one of them which I think is great is hosted channels.  Do you know how a hosted channel works?

Peter McCormack: No, but I can probably guess from the title.

Ben Arc: Basically, you're using somebody else's liquidity in their channel, but what's cool about it -- so it's a custodial solution, right.  But what's cool about it, rather than it being a Wallet of Satoshi where -- and again, hats off to Wallet of Satoshi, he's done great things for Lightning; but it is fully custodial and they could just lie about your balance amount on there, and there's nothing you can really do about it.

With a hosted channel, you have cryptographic proof if someone tries to rip you off.  So, I can spin up a Simple Bitcoin wallet and I think hosted channel will become quite a thing in Lightning, because it patches it up and makes it work how it was originally promised to work or how a lot of us thought it would work; yeah, you can open a Simple Bitcoin wallet, it will automatically get a hosted channel, it takes seconds.  It goes and gets a hosted channel, maybe it could get a hosted channel from someone like LNBIG, some big operator.  They can get a fee for this; they can charge for this service and get some yield on their liquidity in their channels.  They can actually use it I think as well to balance their own trails.

Anyway, you go get a hosted channel so it gives you instantly 1 million Satoshis inbound liquidity, so you can start receiving payments.  If LNBIG rip you off, you have a cryptographic proof which you can take publicly and say, "I have proof this node ripped me off", which you don't have when it comes to other custodial solutions.  I think that's really nice.  It's appreciating there's nuance all these topics.  So custodianship, yes, there's very bad forms of it which people should really not do, but then there's better forms of it.  It's a very grey area, it's a grey spectrum.  .

Another thing hosted channels do very well is, if you make a hosted channel public, the trust which you're putting into the hosted channel provide, if someone is using it for routing payments, they don't have to put that trust in there.  If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, the payment doesn't go through.  But what it means is we can have many more channels without those on-chain transactions.  So, it's a very interesting technology.  I think we're going to talk about, if we have time, maybe stablecoins and stuff.

Peter McCormack: We'll come back to that.  So, a couple of things that have been on my mind a long time with it and the circle I was never able to square early on was, if people needed to open up channels to be able to use the Lightning Network.  Where on-chain Visa, up to say £5 or something at that point, you might be in jurisdictions where that's all the Bitcoin they have.  There are certain people who just will need to only live on Lightning, which we know; certain jurisdictions and maybe for certain periods of time.  But how does that person use Bitcoin in a way where their funds are protected yet they never have any on-chain Bitcoin; how does that happen; can it happen?

Ben Arc: With Lightning, it's a hot wallet so the wallet needs to be connected, it needs to be online.  You can't take those Lightning funds and put them into cold storage.  Bitcoin is whatever we want it to be and whatever the world needs it to be, and if there's any problem we have, like the scaling problem, now we have Lightning Network.  There are a bunch of new problems, but we have something which does work, and you can do these microtransactions.  I think that as a problem will be addressed as a way, how do people accumulate and secure long-term cold-storage Bitcoin if they haven't got enough to be able to pay the fee, the on-chain fee?  Maybe the block reward should be lifted and maybe we should breach the 21 million.

Peter McCormack: That's a controversial one, I'll come back to that one!  It is on my mind, because  I've spent a lot of time recently trying to challenge myself as, could we be wrong; could I be wrong?  I always think it's a really important question you have to ask yourself and I don't think it's asked enough.  What are the consequences of this?  Theoretically I completely buy into Bitcoin, a fixed-limit based money that can take us away from the ills of money-printing.  That I'm 100% convinced on.  I am 100% convinced on the idea that having peer-to-peer censorship resistant payments is great for the world. 

What I'm not 100% aware of or understand is the consequences.  What are the unknown consequences of this, what does this mean?

Ben Arc: The economic consequences of having some arbitrary number and having that as just the amount of Bitcoin which will always and ever exist.  There should never be dogma, and anything said about Bitcoin which is certain, because Bitcoin will and can be anything that people want it to be.

Peter McCormack: I'm always saying, "What if I'm wrong?  Where can we be wrong?"  If we go to hyperbitcoinisation, there's one thing I am not convinced of yet, is does that create a more equal world or a less equal world economically?  My thoughts behind it are, "Will western nations accumulate the most Bitcoin first; and will some nations who will arrive late accumulate less, but still need to come onto Bitcoin because is everyone else is having it; and will we have the Bitcoin haves and have nots, those who can afford to use the basechain and those who can't?"

I'm not saying what will happen, I just don't know and I'm perfectly conscious and aware of it, it's something I just think about a lot.  Do you understand what I'm wrestling with, the idea that I'm convinced Bitcoin is better for everyone --

Ben Arc: I think one of the biggest problems with wealth disparity in this world is that control over money is in the hands of a few people who then enrich themselves.  And I think ultimately the system's rigged and that is a big problem, and I think Bitcoin solves that problem.  But we do print money, we create Bitcoins every time we mine a block, we're printing money.

Peter McCormack: You choose the principle.

Ben Arc: Yeah, it's predictable and we choose to print it at a certain rate, but there's no reason why we couldn't change that rate at some point in the near future.

Peter McCormack: Again, we come back to that, it's a very controversial thing!

Ben Arc: What I want to say is that if you define Bitcoin, this always me cringe when people say, "There'll only ever be 21 million.  It's the soundest money the world has ever had.  It's the hardest money the world has ever had.  It incentivises mining renewables".  There are all these statements which ideologically -- so basically when you have culture, or a collection of people who share an ideology, within that ideology you'll have rhetoric.  You'll have a bunch of statements which are true about that thing at any point in time.

Then people will take that rhetoric to the next level, where they'll identify themselves to that rhetoric and it will be like, "This is a truth, this is a truth, this is a truth".  Then if anything challenges that truth, they feel it very personally, like it's challenging them personally and they have that amygdala response of, "You're turning my universe upside down", which is why Peter Todd recently tweeted out about this thing about maybe we should have an ongoing -- 

Peter McCormack: I've got a story about that.

Ben Arc: If we want a zero-rate of inflation on Bitcoin, which will probably be in the best interests of most users, so most users will probably vote for it in the future.  If we want zero inflation on Bitcoin, then we could have a constant Bitcoin reward for miners.  And actually, when we lose the mining reward, maybe it will be within the interests for the security of Bitcoin for that mining reward to be continued.  Theoretically, it's a very sound argument, this concept that there'll only ever be 21 million; it's just not true, you can't say that.

Peter McCormack: It might be.

Ben Arc: It might be, but it doesn't mean that you should close yourself off to the debate that, "What happens when we get to that point when we're not rewarding miners", if we're still on proof of work, because we might not be.

Peter McCormack: No, I get it.  What you're basically saying is you should not be your ideas.

Ben Arc: Yeah.

Peter McCormack: Your ideas and you should be separate, because when you are your ideas, that has consequences that come with it.  That means you defend them unequivocally and you won't challenge yourself.

Ben Arc: No, I think there is something good about that.  So if you think about the maximalists, the archetypal Bitcoin maximalists, they do do a very good job at talking down all these scams by being so strong-willed and inspirational and they're flying that flag.

Peter McCormack: Do they prevent scams?

Ben Arc: They do, but I think they do push a lot of good talent in the wrong direction, away from Bitcoin sometimes, because they can be a little bit too obnoxious.  There's two different approaches to any statement and that's rhetoric: this thing's true, everything else is bad and wrong, and it is very binary; or there's something maybe a little bit more nuanced, which is the dialectic where you have a thesis, you have an antithesis and then we have a synthesis, so there is probably some middle ground we can find in the middle. 

I think what you're saying about constantly questioning yourself and your own ideas and thinking, "Am I wrong; am I the bad guy?" I think it's the best thing to do.  Historically, the common sense of any age has been proven to be wrong later on, like women are the property of men, for one.

Peter McCormack: The Earth is flat.

Ben Arc: The Earth is flat, these were common, "Of course, that's true", and then actually they're challenged.

Peter McCormack: I have to challenge for a different reason though, because I don't think people realise, well maybe because I talk about it all the time they do, but me and Danny talk about this stuff a lot.  Like, "What is this podcast; what is this role; what is this responsibility; what is our responsibility?"  I think there is an expectation sometimes from people that this is a product for promoting Bitcoin and should cheerlead Bitcoin unequivocally, and therefore if I have Udi Wertheimer on the show, I am anti-Bitcoin and I should be punished for it.

Our approach is different.  Our approach is, we like Bitcoin, we support Bitcoin, but every idea should be challenged because we can't damage Bitcoin, but conversations can improve it.  And it's a real fine balancing act because we hold Bitcoin, we support Bitcoin, but we don't always just want to be cheerleaders.  We want to challenge; we want to have the variety of voices.  We want you on here, Ben, and we want Anita, and we want Stephan Livera, and we want Marty.  We want left, right, middle, hardcore maxis.  We want everyone so we can get the collective knowledge, so people can find their best path this with this.

Ben Arc: Also, you build the best value proposition which you can then take out to the rest of the world, because you've actually explored that ideology and those ideas thoroughly and you have good arguments.  So when you turn round to people and say, "Bitcoin incentivises renewables, mining renewables, of course it does, it goes where the energy's cheapest", if you haven't really thought about that statement, someone will just turn around and say, "Surely, it incentivises fossil fuels because it's a better baseload.  In Wales, I can spin up a little coal powerplant and I can mine some Bitcoin and I don't have to sell the energy back to the grid.  So, surely all the arguments you're making for renewables you could also make for fossil fuels, and actually they're probably stronger for fossil fuels".

Then suddenly, this thing which you were so sure about because within your group that rhetoric was like, "Yeah, yeah", and you're backing each other up, and you're in your little audience capture thing, "Yeah, that's true, this is a truth"; suddenly when you take it out to the rest of the world and then say it, they just tear it to pieces quite easily because you haven't really thought through that statement, such as the 21 million thing, and this is why dissident thinking in Bitcoin, this is why you need people challenging.  Then there's someone like Peter Todd, who is very well respected in our community obviously, I was very relieved that he has broached this question about the 21 million.

Peter McCormack: I mean, it needs somebody like him to do it!

Ben Arc: Honestly, I am playing devil's advocate.  I think that there's two versions of Bitcoin which could exist.  There's one where you have zero rate of inflation, that could be very useful; and then there's one where you just keep the 21 million cap, and you can build a whole bunch of cool stuff on Bitcoin in order to have stable mediums of exchange for people, like El Salvador dollar and whatever, the Welsh pound, you can build those monies.

Peter McCormack: The Welsh pound?

Danny Knowles: That's a shitcoin.

Peter McCormack: He doesn't say much.  A sheep coin!  Sorry!

Ben Arc: The Bank of England, not the Bank of Britain, the Bank of England, do they have our best interests at heart?  The Bristol Pound was a great phenomenon I always think, the technology was terrible, but culturally people really associated themselves to it.  You know people talk about -- I mean, we're probably running out of time --

Peter McCormack: Just keep going, man, honestly. 

Ben Arc: People talk about these stable mediums of exchange for areas in which they need it, say in El Salvador, it's like, "Okay, now we can have this stable USD", and it's like "Yeah, cool", but they don't want to use USD.  It's an imperialist power which has subjugated them, and it's caused a lot of problems for Central America and South America, and they don't feel great about a lot of the US stuff, so they probably want their own currency, they want to be their own sovereign currency producer, like some of the other big powers.  But they want it to be stable and they want it to be corruption resistant and also resistant to attack from the imperialist power.

So, how does El Salvador build a stablecoin which is decentralised enough that it can't be corrupted from outside or within; but then also can reach consensus in something like an economic crisis, or to create some fiscal stimulus if they want to do that in their own country, if they want soft currency functions which we, with developed economies, as sovereign currency producers in our own country, we can do, like with the British pound, or whatever, or Iceland can do, or countries which produce their own currency?

I think this is the most fascinating thing about the renewable debate actually, is very early on, on Bitcoin talk, somebody posted that, "Bitcoin is thermodynamically perverse".  Then Satoshi answered with, "I think", not "I know", but, "I think, similar to goldmining, that Bitcoin has a whole bunch of commodity uses.  And when we've explored all those thoroughly, the things which Bitcoin will replace will make it a net positive".  That's what I think too, so I'm ecologically minded, I think Bitcoin has a horrible carbon footprint, currently the way we're using it, me sending value to you, whatever. 

But I think that with all Taproot and everything else we can do on Bitcoin now, that when countries have their stable mediums of exchange, built on top of Bitcoin, and when you're replacing all the central banks and all this banking infrastructure and you're replacing Visa and everything else, I think there'll be a net positive, no matter what we're mining it on, we could be mining it on coal.

Peter McCormack: That's why it's important to get to a place where we have good discussion and good rhetoric.  We do and we don't at the moment.  Certain topics may be off topic, so I was just really fucking disappointed what happened with Matt Corallo.

Danny Knowles: Over the last week.

Ben Arc: He's always getting in trouble.

Peter McCormack: He's tweeted something about shitcoins.  What was it? 

Danny Knowles: Do you want me to pull it up?

Peter McCormack: Yeah, just pull it up.  Again, I have close to zero interest in shitcoins, the only one I have a mild interest in, I don't call it a shitcoin actually, is Monero and I think there's valid reasons.  Some people will call you a shitcoin scammer for going about it, but I want to know what's going on.  I had Vitalik on the show, because it was at a point where it was worthwhile having a debate of Bitcoin versus Ethereum.  And probably 70% of people who listen to the show probably own a shitcoin of some kind.  I have just no interest in the shitcoins, but I want to hear what Matt Corallo says about it, because I like Matt and I respect him.

Ben Arc: Clever dude.

Peter McCormack: He's a clever dude and I want to hear it, and then I'm going to dismiss it and get on with my life.  But what was concerning for me and quite sinister is the follow-up to him having the statement were personal attacks on his career history.  People are digging up the fact that there was an inflation bug that he was involved in creating.  Now, let's just be honest about that, bugs happen, that's why you have people checking code, etc, but that was brought up and other things were brought up.

Ben Arc: It's like step up, review the code, contribute, get involved in building on Bitcoin.  If you're that unhappy with the inflation bug, partly the reason that happened was just literally, there weren't enough people with their eyes on the code.  Get involved.

Peter McCormack: My point is, break down his arguments, don't character assassinate him because that has a couple of consequences.  You might have people quit Bitcoin because of that and be pushed to work on other things.  Even Van Der Laan said in reply to that, "It might be time for me to move on soon".

Ben Arc: Yeah, classic.

Peter McCormack: I know of other devs who are just sick of it, they're just sick of the situation.

Ben Arc: Bullyboy mob situation.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, and the second consequence is other people might be scared to even have a conversation and say, "Well I want to discuss this, but I don't want to have my reputation destroyed".  I think this is not good.  This isn't about saying, "Toxic bitcoiners are mean", this is just about saying, "We should be able to discuss things and we should be able to have honest and open debate and we should be able to critique things and then move on.  If we can't do that, what do we have?  We have this very strict circle of ideas that we can't move from.

Now, having gone back and read a lot of Nakamoto Institute and old Bitcoin talk forums, yeah, they were tough debates, but they were debates.

Ben Arc: Like Satoshi, "I think".

Peter McCormack: Yeah, "I think".  I don't know, maybe it's just because we're European and we're a bit different, although we've got some toxic Europeans; but I just think having the discussion is what needs to happen.  So, the thing about the 21 million, I disagree with inflation right now, constant inflation, but I want to hear the arguments for and against it and why it might happen.  I want to know.  It's relevant to me, I'm a Bitcoin holder, but what does it mean.  So, let's have the discussion.

Ben Arc: I would like to say as well with the caveat I'm not advocating for this, I'm just saying that this is a discussion, very interesting.  I personally think it's more likely to happen in the future because --

Peter McCormack: Security.

Ben Arc: It's game theoretically that users would want it to happen.  It'll be hard because consensus is super-duper hard on Bitcoin obviously, so maybe that will be the reason it doesn't happen.

Peter McCormack: It is one of those things if it does happen, there will be a chain split.

Ben Arc: Yeah, this is a really interesting thing actually, because I posted a tweet about this about two years ago.  The common reaction was, "I'll sell all my Bitcoin immediately".  I was like, "Yeah, that's kind of the point".  The reason why we have inflation is to loosen people's grip on an asset, to create fiscal stimulus and to create demand and all that sort of stuff.  If that's what the users of Bitcoin want it to do, that's what they'll have it do, despite how you may feel about Bitcoin right now and what it is.

But the mob mentality with rhetoric and ideology is a problem.  A lot of you were admiring I have a sticker on my laptop, and it says, "Bitcoin, nein danke!", and I got it from a hacker event and people had posted these stickers everywhere.  It's a hacker event and they posted these "Bitcoin, nein danke " stickers as these German hackers clearly don't like Bitcoin.  On all the bins, they posted these stickers saying, "Put your Bitcoin here".  I'm like, "Man, this is such a shame.  These people haven't looked at the technology, they've looked at the cultural association of a culture and then they've stopped there, they got greed", all this stuff I don't like.  They haven't actually looked deeply into the technology.

It's a shame, I think if we were more welcoming as users, as a community whatever, then we would pull in more talent.  But then I do also think that the maximalist type does hold a purpose for defending against the shitcoin stuff.

Peter McCormack: I agree.  I mean, you say that, but does it stop shitcoins?  The one thing I want to ask myself is the amount of time spent on that, is that a net good or if all that time -- because you see these people all day long bash, bash, bash, "Shitcoin this, shitcoin that, you're a scammer".

Ben Arc: Angry.

Peter McCormack: I look at the time I'm on Twitter sometimes and think, "If I spent that time learning a language, would that improve my life?"  If they spend that time creating educational materials and teach a bit about Bitcoin, would that have a stronger net impact for individuals and Bitcoin?

Ben Arc: It's a direct-action thing which is the Cypherpunk Manifesto,  "Cypherpunks write code".  Rather than spend all your time just doing hot air, actually build something or make something or contribute in some way.

Peter McCormack: Sorry, where did Max go?

Danny Knowles: He's just out there.

Peter McCormack: Max, quick question.  We've been joined by Max Hillebrand here, this is a cool time.  Quick question: yes or no.

Max Hillebrand: What's up?

Peter McCormack: Right, just quick.  Bitcoin inflation: absolutely not, fuck off, never discuss it; have the discussion, because it could be possible?

Max Hillebrand: Ultimately, the actual quantity of the money supply doesn't matter, as long as it's divisible enough, which is the case in Bitcoin.  Then the question is, what do we want with that inflation money, where should it go; what's the fiscal stimulus?  And allegedly, that's to improve the security budget of Bitcoin, to make it more expensive, to reorg blocks and such.

However, the block subsidy doesn't do that.  The attacker gets the block subsidy as well, it's not a mining fee or transactional mining fee, where you only get paid if you actually include the transaction in a block.  So, if you're censoring a transaction, you don't get the fee of that transaction, but you do get the block rewards, the issuance, the inflation so to say.  That's why I think that increasing the issuance rate doesn't increase the security budget of Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: The quick answer I wanted.  I've got to say just for me, as somebody from Bedford who's trying to make Bedford a thing, I'm super proud to have so many bitcoiners here, and who have made the journey here; I feel actually a little bit emotional about it, but no, thank you.

Ben Arc: I'm just going to say about the stable medium of exchange thing, because I think this is a very relevant topic for having people in somewhere like El Salvador on subsistence wages, where they can't have crazy price volatility when it comes to making payments and using it for payments technology.

When I start talking about that more openly about how we need stable mediums of exchange for all these different countries, I had so many legit developer bitcoiners who are very well respected within the community, I won't even mention names, reach out to me quietly and say, "This is my proposal, which I've been working on for a year which tackles this problem".  Some of them were hardcore cypherpunk types who you wouldn’t think would be working on solving such a problem, you'd think they would be more binary in their thinking. 

That's a shame that there's a bunch of people working on these.  I think now obviously it's come to the surface with the Standard Sats and then the stablesats thing by Galoy, and then the Taro stuff from Lightning Labs.  But as another topic, like stable mediums of exchange or Bitcoin, I think that thankfully has become less of a controversy.

Peter McCormack: It should not be controversial.

Ben Arc: It shouldn't be controversial.

Peter McCormack: It should not be controversial.

Ben Arc: Let's build the best payments experience we could possibly build for people.

Peter McCormack: If you think Bitcoin is the only and immediate answer for everybody in the world right now, you're a fucking moron and you've got no idea how people live and survive, how they use money.  Go out there, travel the world, go to developed, underdeveloped countries, meet a wide range of people.  If you think Bitcoin solves every problem because it's got a fixed monetary supply and it's censorship resistant, you're a fucking idiot and that really pisses me off that people say, "They just need Bitcoin".  No, they need stable money.

Ben Arc: 1 Bitcoin is 1 Bitcoin.

Peter McCormack: Just speak to Alex Gladstein, I keep saying it, follow him, follow what he says.  Some people just need a stable form of money that isn't being debased, that's what they need.  They need to know that $100 they slaved away to work and earn that week is going to buy their family $100 of food at the end of the week.  They don't need to be saving in Bitcoin and hoping it goes up, it's fucking bullshit.  It pisses me off, because these people who talk about being anti-human, that is anti-human, it's moronic.  Yeah, I buy your long-term thesis about stable money with Bitcoin, I buy it, fine; but your short-term solutions using Bitcoin are moronic, it pisses me off, sorry, I'm ranting.

Ben Arc: It's great the work which is being done, and actually I think what we'll see emerge in one of these countries which is under the imperialist yoke, such as El Salvador or maybe even Wales, is a local currency which is culturally relevant to the country where it emerges from, and it will probably outcompete the stability of something like the US dollar or euro.  It will be like a collection of fiat, a collection of assets and it will create an incredibly stable peg somehow.  I think that's what will happen.  We'll use this amazing free and open-source toolset to build something which can outcompete the stability of a military-backed fiat currency.  And it will happen in a Central African Republic or something, suddenly they have one of the most stable mediums of exchange.

Peter McCormack: Aren't they shitcoiners; aren't they a shitcoin country?

Ben Arc: Wherever it may happen, I'm sure it'll happen somewhere where they haven't got a central bank infrastructure.

Peter McCormack: They are the ones, aren't they?

Danny Knowles: I think so.

Peter McCormack: Yeah.  I do want to ask you about Fedimint, because we had Obi in, who I think is an amazing human being.  What are your thoughts on it?

Ben Arc: It's great.  I mean, chaumian Ecash, if you can get it to work, federated chaumian Ecash is brilliant work.  There's some issues.  It's not a given that it will work, it's a complicated thing to build, which is why, considering the level of cryptographers we have in Bitcoin, David Chaum of Ecash, whenever it was, in the early 1990s or something, himself has looked at Bitcoin and didn't build it on Bitcoin.  So, I think it's a hard thing to build, but if they can build it and if the Federations cannot be subject to a civil attack, because that's my worry, particularly if you're talking about a country where resources are quite scarce.

This is actually an interesting.  Is the Federation then more likely to become corrupt and have some sort of civil attack or whatever; or is that more likely to happen in a country which has more resources?  I can't really work it out, but anyway I think there's still trust there, you're trusting a Federation.  In some cases, like with the hosted channel thing, personally I might prefer just to trust LNBIG because he's a big channel, he makes loads of yield, he doesn't want the bad press of me being ripped off.

So for an immediate solution for addressing the payment stuff, that might make more sense.  The Standard Sats is a great project, this is made by some of the people who have been involved in the Simple Bitcoin wallet and they have a Simple Bitcoin wallet fork in fact.  The idea is you have a node and then you have a plug-in for the node, and then that plug-in does high frequency hedging with Collider, I think.  What it can do is it can keep a peg, so it can keep a stable USD or euro peg, or a whole collection of assets or fiat, and then you can get a hosted channel, so a fiat hosted channel or this token hosted channel, and you can have it in your Lightning Wallet, and it works; it's a Lightning payment essentially.  I think that's a really interesting solution as well.

So, I think in the immediate term, we're going to have market-based solutions, because Stablesats is very similar to Standard Sats, the way they're addressing this problem.  So you're going to have market-based solutions, which I think Alex Gladstein was talking about as well fairly recently.  Then I think long term, you'll have some stuff which is more algorithmic; and then talking about the shitcoin space MakerDAO and Dai is pretty cool.  It's been working for a while; they've kept that stable peg and they have this weird vault thing, and they use arbitrage and stuff to keep a peg. 

That to me, if someone like El Salvador could have some vault which you send Bitcoin to, the control over the vault is federated via geographical regions in El Salvador, so different political affiliations whatever, and then 50% of that and maybe 50% industry, the industry of the country; basically just decentralised enough that it's corruption resistant, but not so decentralised that if they need some stimulus in an economic disaster, they're not able to do that and use those soft currency functions.  I think if you can have this vault which you chuck Bitcoin into and it's El Salvador dollars and that keeps a peg to a bunch of fiat or some assets, I think that's probably a really good solution, which I want to see happen.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, I love it.

Ben Arc: The MakerDAO stuff, I mean they've kind of proved with the Dai that so far, it's still working and actually keeps getting more stable.

Danny Knowles: Isn't that just because they're just buying USDC now?

Ben Arc: I don't know.  This is one of the legit bitcoiners who I talked about who reached out and said, "This is my proposal to the solution", one of the legit bitcoiners was like, "MakerDAO is a pretty cool thing.  We'll probably build something like that one day".

Peter McCormack: Was it Francis Pouliot?

Ben Arc: Yes, it was!  He told me he's all in Ethereum.  No, I haven't seen that guy for a while actually, he's got some energy, hasn't he?  So I think, in the immediate term, we'll have these market-based solutions, then we'll have more complicated algorithmic solutions and also this Fedimint chaumian Ecash stuff.

What does worry me about the Ecash thing is, it's yet another -- so, you've got your Lightning wallet, you've got your on-chain wallet, and this is your Fedimint chaumian Ecash wallet and then users are going to be like, "What am I using here?"  I mean it's in good hands, there's great people working on the project, Justin Moon now, he's working on it, Obi's there and he's great.

Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's a great team.

Ben Arc: If anyone's going to do it, it's going to be that lot.  They're going to be able to make this thing reality, and if they do then it'll be great.  Actually I spoke to Obi because I was like, "Oh, no, is LNbits now defunct?" because we're using obviously Lightning, aren't we, a lot of our stuff is bolt11-based.  But the invoicing system they're going to use is very similar to bolt11, will be very similar to bolt11.

Peter McCormack: I mean, I'm nodding like I know; I have no idea.

Ben Arc: Just basically, I request an invoice from you, and then I pay it.  We could actually have a chaumian Ecash wallet as a funding source for an LNbits instal, which is kind of cool.

Peter McCormack: That's very cool.

Ben Arc: Actually, we could even make an extension which is then part of the Federation maybe as well.  There's certainly some cool things which can be built off the back of it.  I just wish them luck, because it's a hard thing to build.

Peter McCormack: A big project, yeah, but they're going for it.  We had them here a couple of days ago, I was very impressed with him, so fingers crossed.

Ben Arc: Also I would like to say that I'm mostly playing devil's advocate for a lot of these topics, I'm just throwing the conversation out there and I'm not -- 

Peter McCormack: Shitcoin apologist, inflation apologist.

Ben Arc: I'm not saying, "Reach 21 million, go buy Dai".

Peter McCormack: Firstly tell people where to go to find out more about LNbits and what you're doing.

Ben Arc: So, if you go to LNbits.com, you can go there and there's links to the repos there.  Then also for the hardware stuff, that's mostly on my repo.  So we have two Telegram groups, we've got the LNbits Telegram group and then we have Makerbits Telegram group t.me/makerbits.  That's where we talk about a lot of the hardware stuff.  It's great to see people like Stadicus getting involved in it.  I think I said earlier in the show that right now he's doing a workshop for that point of sale in Germany somewhere and it's so cool.

Then in the LNbits Telegram group there, it's very good, we have like 1,000 people there and they're constantly helping each other with any issues they have or if any news come in and they can't instal it.  People are so patient.  I see them answering the same question again and again and again, but honestly the community is incredible, and it wouldn't be the software it is without the community.

If you go to LNbits.com there's links to the Legend software which is the Python version, which we've got here which we're trying to get out of beta.  We also have this Go version for the Go programmers out there called Infinity.  That does extensions kind of differently, but it's a very interesting piece of software which we're all very excited about and want to work on as well.  First, we need to get Legend out of beta fully functional, fully stable, and then do some things as well like extrapolate extensions out, so you have that WordPress experience.  Then we'll concentrate as well on this other Infinity project.

But yeah, there's some great things being built and a big shoutout to the developers working on LNbits.  So Calle he's been managing the repo amazingly, he's built out this massive testing suite and he's putting all these great commits; DNI did the looping out extension; Vlad Stan with the hardware wallet; Tal was with us from the beginning, he made the point-of-sale extension; BlackCoffee, who does AnchorHodl, the shop AnchorHodl here, he's going to be managing the LNbits shop where we're going to be selling some of the gizmos and stuff.  But ultimately, buy the bits yourself from AliExpress, build it yourself, we're going to make it as simple as possible, like Lego, to put the thing together.

Currently, as I say with the hardware projects, for example, you'll have to download Arduino, the IDE and you'll have to install some stuff and then you'll have to flash the thing, but soon you'll be able to go into LNbits, plug in the device and then just flash the software from LNbits onto the device.  So, you could just get the off-the-shelf hardware, plug it in, press a button.  It just pushes the binary onto the device.  The binary will have a checksum so you can verify that it's not been corrupted, and you can go check the checksum against the binary on the repo for the project; for like the point of sale for example. 

I think that becomes really interesting then, when people don't actually have to -- they can get an off-the-shelf device, they can build a hard wallet, they can build an ATM, they can build a point of sale, and it doesn't require them downloading any IDEs or anything or installing anything.  It's just a case of, "Click and flash it".

Peter McCormack: Proper cypherpunk.

Ben Arc: Cypherpunks write code, don't only build stuff; they have to keep building things.

Peter McCormack: Well listen, I'd love to get you down for our next meetup at the club.  I want to buy one of the big cash -- 

Ben Arc: I've got it.  My partner will be super-happy that this massive thing will be out of our dining room because it currently sits in the middle of our dining room; she hates it.

Peter McCormack: I want that, and I want three of these and give me an invoice, we'll pay for it.  Come down, run the session with us.  Come and see how it all works, we'll do it together.  I'd love to have you down there, hopefully we can make the date work and that'd be awesome, man.  But really appreciate you, Ben, this was a great conversation.

Ben Arc: Thank you, Peter, thank you for all the work you're doing, it's great.

Peter McCormack: Anything we can do for you in the future let me know, but keep crushing, man.