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- [00:00]
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Sam. Foreign.
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Bitcoin Tuesday Freaks. It's your host Odell here for another Citadel Dispatch. The show focus on actual bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. The current block height is 944-073. Sasper dollar is 1-466. Bitcoin price is $68,189. One bitcoin in gold terms gets you 14.78 ounces of gold, down 44% of the year against gold. That's one to watch. Today's date is Tuesday, April 7th. The current time is 1700 UTC. You'll be listening to this in a couple hours. As always, Freaks, Dispatch is supported by viewers like you. Our audience supports us with bitcoin donations. Thank you for everyone who continues to support the show. The top zap from last week was Ride or die freak mav21 with 10,000 sats and he said great rip. Thank you Mav. Thank you everyone else. If you don't have SATs to support the show, best way to support the show is to share it with your friends and family. Dispatch is available in every major podcast app by just searching Citadel Dispatch. Or you can go to citadel dispatch.com where we have all the relevant links for you. Also, while I'm at it, check out citadelwire.com if you haven't in a bit I made some updates to help you monitor the situation. Anyway guys, with all that said, I got a great rip lined up. We had Justin join us from the Fediman Project back in September. So what is that? That is about seven months ago, About a little over half a year. He works. He's one of the main contributors for the Fediman Open Source project. Not to be confused by Fedi, the company that's building on top of the open source project. And he has a bunch of updates for us. How's it going Justin?
- [02:34]
A
Good. Thanks for having me back on the show. I'm a big fan, so it's always fun to be here. Yeah, love it.
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B
The pleasure's mine. We've been trying to coordinate this for a bit, so I'm glad we finally made it happen. And in general, I really like this six month cadence. Covering important projects and seeing where we're at because things move faster than people realize. People are both disappointed. Things both move slower than people anticipate, but then also move much faster than people realize. I think you get stuck in a disenfranchisement loop if you're just paying attention
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A
to it every day. Right, Right. Definitely. Yeah. I think we've had, we've had Two, we try to do quarterly releases. So we've had I think two updates since the last time we, we chatted. Maybe there was one that was right on the edge there.
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B
So the big one for starters, and I think an interesting place to start here is the big release that you had talked about in the last rip we did was the E Cash app. Um, what's the deal with that at this point?
- [03:36]
A
Yeah, we can start there. So E Cash app I didn't mention last time, but we're, we're trying to position it kind of as like the reference client for Fedimint. Maybe not in terms of like this is exactly how you should build a wallet, but it's gonna try to show like all the, the details of what Fedimint's doing. So I don't remember which update we talked about last time, but it was
- [04:01]
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brand new last time it was brand new. It's like I think you had just released it.
- [04:05]
A
Okay, yeah, we're on 070 now, or 071. I think we have been shipping for that an update almost every two weeks. There's a lot of UI improvements and stuff. But yeah, it's generally it's on Chain Lightning and Ecash Wallet for Fetiman and so it can do all three of those payments. We lean somewhat heavily into nostr. So we have like a NOSTR based contact system now where you don't actually log in with Nostr, you can just give it a public key, your endpub, so you can actually set it up for anyone's endpub. You could use Odell's and see all your contacts of who to pay. We have. So we have that. And then like on the other NOSTR feature we have NOSTR Wallet Connect as well, which I always found fun to implement. We kind of have this NOSTR based recovery mechanism as well where it doesn't store. We don't use NOSTR for any like sensitive data. It's essentially we just store the invite codes for your, the federations that you joined. We essentially have this problem where inside of it we have like a bip 39 like recovery mechanism where you can write down your seed words and that will restore your secret for your wallet, but it doesn't tell you which federations that you were previously joined to. So unless you just remember that, which you might be a little confused when you recover, it's like, oh, where's my money? So we, yeah, we, we use NOSTR for that. We just encrypt the invite codes for the federations that You've joined and then store them a noster. And we actually derive the noster identity based off of the root secret from your seed phrase. So you really just need the seed phrase and all your, all your money comes back in the federation.
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B
I am. First of all, I realized freaks, if you have no idea what Fediment is, go listen to Seal Dispatch 178 because like we're kind of like going from that point, but just like a quick, just a really quick 101. On Fedimint, it can be thought of similar to Cashew. It's another Charmian ecash implementation, but instead of having a single mint, right, that is managing the funds, you have a federation. So you can think of it like a multi sig where you would need multiple of the federated parties to collude in order to steal money or to make a mistake to lose money.
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A
Yeah, exactly. Underneath the hood it is a multisig. Right. So for a federation with four, we call them like guardians. Each guardian holds one key to the multisig and they all like three. In a typical deployment, three. Three of the four need to sign for any of the. The money to move. Yeah, I think.
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B
Yeah, go on.
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A
Our most common deployments are for guardians, but we'd like to see larger deployments going forward. It's just you obviously need to like coordinate with the number of people to deploy one of those.
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B
So it makes it more complicated, there's more moving pieces. I think what a lot of people miss too is, you know, there's a lot of focus and maybe rightfully so, whether it's Cashew or Fediment on rug pull risk.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But the bigger issue is actually just unintentional uptime failures. Right. Where you can't access your money because guardians are offline. And so as you add more to the mix, you're obviously adding additional concerns on that front now.
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Yeah, you stole a point. I was just about to say, I think that's worth emphasizing actually because like running because like. So Fediman's call like was byzantine fault tolerant, but just running a fault tolerance system where you can tolerate, you know, a server going down is difficult. Right. Like that's kind of why these big companies have such value prop is that they, they can maintain these high uptimes. And for Fediman and just ecash in general, like you said, like the. The purpose is to kind of target communities and have known people that you interact with running these things. And so it kind of puts like, more say like average node runners in the position of running, running a service which as you mentioned, like, even if they're being, you know, not malicious at all, it's a, it's a difficult thing to like pull off with high, high uptime. So yeah, it's nice in fundament that that's kind of tied in just to the trust model where if a server goes down like the system doesn't stop, stop working. And I don't, I won't say it's this, but I've heard stories. We've had multiple examples of federations running for quite a long time, probably longer than you'd be comfortable with with, with a server down and, and things just keep working. Yeah, and on that, on that front too, I think a lot of the stuff we've been doing over the last six months has been kind of targeted at like how can we make it as easy as possible for people to participate in running one of these things? So that's where a lot of the improvements have been.
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B
Yeah, I think, yeah. I mean a lot of the success and failure. We've talked about fediman many times, not only on this, on the last rip we did, but on dispatch in general. Yeah, I, I'm in. I've been increasingly convinced that this project success and failure relies on one, making it reducing friction of actually spinning up one of these federations. But second of all, that second piece, which arguably is more difficult, which is making it accessible to run a relatively high uptime guardian because if you can just like do the bare minimum, then that's actually maybe even a worse position than if you can't do it at all. So this E Cash app, just to put the pin in it is, you know, a front end app that you guys are designing a wallet, you know, a wallet app that people would be used to that, that supports fediments, that's completely open source, it's available on Android and Linux and you can get it at Ecash. Love, by the way, on the backup thing, the Noster backup thing. Just a tangent. Recently Primal was a custodial strike wallet which was obviously not ideal, but in bitcoin land, like accepting zaps, you know, like someone like signs up for a new Nostr account and wants to like immediately receive 10sats. Your options are quite limited. Obviously. We explored Ecash and fediment. We ended up deciding that right now the best trade off balance for our users is Spark. So we have a Spark Wallet. And the reason I bring this up is twofold. First of all, with the Spark Wallet, we're giving people a seed Right. And now there's multiple Spark based wallets. So there's Wallet of Satoshi, there's Cake Wallet, there's Breeze, there's Blitz, there's a couple others I think. And you can just take the seed and move it over and restore it on any of these other wallets, which is great. Any Bitcoiner that's used to Seeds, that's like, that's an awesome feature. I think. Now for our users who, you know, sometimes are Bitcoin noobs, seeds can be a little bit daunting. So we've been, or let me put it this way. So then there's another Nostr app I don't know if you're familiar with called Wisp, made by this awesome dude utxo, who I should actually probably have on the show in the next couple of weeks to talk about Wisp, but he has a new Nostr Android app and he also implemented Spark and you can take the seed and move it back and forth. But what he implemented was something that we've been thinking about but don't know if the trade offs are worth it. And that's he is taking the seed, he's encrypting it with your NSEC and then he's storing it on relays. So if you open up and it's a relatively simple spec, so presumably like if Primal did that as well, then if you sign in with your NSEC on Wisp, your wallet is already there and you don't have to enter seed words. Right. It's just pulling it from relays. Now the negative is once you put something on relays you have to assume it's there forever and if your NSEC is compromised, you lose your money. But it's just kind of an interesting thought process on the trade offs of UX and security and threat models.
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It's a interesting idea like to reduce the number of things that you need to keep track of. Right. Because if you, with an NSEC and a seed phrase it's like, okay, now you need to have both of those things. Right. And for. Yeah, we, we didn't take that approach but we, the what we're encrypting is the invite codes. So like even if that gets leaked, it's at most a privacy leak as far as which federations you were involved with. But for us it reduces the number of things that you need to keep track of. Now it's just a seed phrase, so.
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Right, makes sense.
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I.
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And then the other piece there is one of the main reasons we ended up Going with Spark over Cashew or Fediment was this problem that I've been discussing for years now, which is the UX around mint selection, in this case Federation selection. How are you guys thinking about that? The issue, just to put the high level, the way I look at the issue is as a wallet developer, you don't want to choose the mint for them. Obviously it's an important choice. So how do users in an educated way make that decision?
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A
Yeah, that's a fantastic question. So I think still, still open like probably both on the Federation side and Cashew. Right. We in an Ecash app right now we do pull, there's Nip87 which allows you to like list off essentially like make your federation public or your mid public where you can advertise via Noster that you're, you're there and then there's part of it that you can like submit recommendations and stuff. So right now at Ecash app we just list off those entries and you can, you can join if you'd like. But we don't, we don't do anything more than that currently. It's something I want to add to I think like there's, there seems to be something as far as like the web of trust plus like Mint selection that could be done there like figuring out, you know, if your friends use it. But it would need to be done sort of in a privacy conscious way. You don't obviously want to be doxing if you're using a mint or not unless that's voluntary. So yeah, I mean I think, yeah, I don't have a great solution yet but it's something we'd like to add as Bitcoin.
- [15:16]
B
Mints.com is an interesting step in that direction in terms of Noster. Enable Web of Trust for Mint selection and it covers both Cashew and federmint. Obviously I don't think it's a real concern if it's a local community.
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A
Right.
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If your tribal chieftain is running the federation then you're just going to use his.
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There's also observer.fedmin.orgserver observer observer. Oh yeah, Federated Observer. There's a handful of federations on there and that's also I believe pulling public nostr data and then for that it has a little bit more fediment specific data. So it'll show some like transactions and
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the on chain data.
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Right.
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Because Cashew. One of the big differences between Cashew and, and Fedimint is Fedimint is on chain native and Cashew is. I don't even wanna say lightning native, but it's lightning only lightning powered.
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Yeah.
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Okay, awesome. So on that topic of federations and making it easier to use federations, my understanding is that you guys have released an Android app that I can run a guardian on my phone.
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A
Yeah. Well, before we get there.
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Sounds crazy. Just saying out loud. Sorry, continue.
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It's a little crazy, I'll acknowledge that. So the we. I think we probably mentioned it last time, but there. Right now there's both Umbrell and Start nine packages for.
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Okay.
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Running a guardian. So I'd say that would definitely be the preferred way to do it given that it's, you know, a dedicated somewhat like server box.
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Yeah. So let's talk about that because a lot of us have Start nines already.
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Yeah.
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What does that look like? Obviously I'm installing it. I assume it's a community registry.
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Yep, it's in the community registry. It all works the same honestly. Underneath essentially you install it and it's a. It's a Docker image and it will deploy Fediment D which comes with little ui. And really the only. The main pain point in setting a federation up is just the beginning part. Once it's kind of set up and you have the backup configured correctly, you don't need to do anything. You just sort of leave it there and let it have power. But to set one up, that's like the. They were like the setup ceremony. That's where you need to get together with your. With your other guardians and exchange these like setup codes.
- [17:58]
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You're like basically copying pasting in signal.
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Right? Yeah, that's. That's. I'd say recommended way as well. We did add QR codes which you know, if you're running it on Start nine is not maybe super helpful. But as.
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But if you're in person, it could be.
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Yeah.
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B
And you have to be in person, right?
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Yeah. If to use that I. With. We can get into the phone but with the phone it's really easy to see set up via QR codes and I've. I've done that through webcams and stuff before, which is kind of humorous but.
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Well, let's not. We started with the Start nine and Umbrel.
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Yeah.
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The backup process, everything is built into the app. It should be relatively straightforward or.
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A
Yeah. On Start nine there's automated backup. So it will actually on fedimint is a consensus system. Right. So it. We have. So similar to what our. It's like a. We have a session where that's kind of like a unit of consensus. And on every session we will. There's actually a database checkpoint that gets written out to the Start 9 backup, so you're able to easily recover that way. But the critical piece of information to back up is available in the dashboard. So Fediment doesn't use like a. It's not a standard like bit 39 wallet. But what you can do is you download this like, TAR file essentially, and that's encrypted with your password. So it's. You can store it, say, on the cloud safely. But that's really what you need to. To recover. If you ever need to recover. You need that. That TAR file which has your. Your secret, essentially.
- [19:35]
B
Yeah, so that's pretty straightforward. That's awesome. Uh, what about. Does it run all right through Tor or how are you handling that?
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Yeah, right now we're looking at adding that there's ongoing work for that. There's. There's no Tor support between guardians right now.
- [19:57]
B
Do I remember you saying something about Airo? Was that you?
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A
Yeah. So IRO is kind of how all this works. Like, that's the only reason why we're able to do this Start nine in. In umbrel packages. Um, IRO is kind of like the basis for how it's the basis for the Guardians communicate and also how the clients talk to both the guardians and at this point the gateway as well. And so, yeah, airo's pretty cool. I think we. We chatted about it more in depth last time, but basically it does like hole punching and uses like these quick streams to.
- [20:29]
B
So it's communicating between the guardians is using Airo.
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A
Yeah, yeah, directly.
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B
But then what about the user to the Federation? Because it didn't. Didn't both have a DNS requirement previously.
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A
Yeah, and that's all like, the DNS requirement's totally gone now. The clients all know how to talk to the guardians via Airo and then the guardians all know how to talk to each other also via Airo. Yeah. And IRO is interesting because it. It's kind of. Their Tagline is like P2P networking made. Made simple. So they. Yeah, you directly talk to them. That's kind of the whole point of the. Of the whole punching system. Both the clients, they establish direct. Direct connections.
- [21:14]
B
What about like the privacy from the privacy perspective of someone running this on their start 9 is my ISP is going to know I'm running a guardian.
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A
Yeah. Again, this is an area of improvement. So we've run guardians on Uninet over Mulvad before, so you can definitely Run it behind a vpn. As I mentioned, we don't currently have like integrated Tor support, but we're, we're working on that. Yeah. By. So by default, if you don't take any protections like your IP could be exposed. Airo has like, it has two modes. It has like direct connection mode and it has like this relayed mode and the relays are there for helping like establish connections. So when it's in relayed mode it doesn't, it doesn't leak your, your ip, but when it, when you do direct connections it will.
- [22:05]
B
So but it would still leak it to your isp. No.
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A
Right. Your ISP would still know that you're running a guardian. Yeah, it would. See, essentially I don't. The.
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B
I'm trying to figure out like, does Palantir just have like a list of people running guardians at home? I mean if people were running guardians at home, let's say
- [22:27]
A
there might. Maybe there's a different way of figuring the. All the traff like encrypted via these qwik via like the QWIK protocol. So I think it'd be pretty hard to figure out that you're running specifically a Guardian, like a Fediment Guardian. But as far as there are still like ways to leak IPs right now and definitely if you're running a Guardian, I'd probably recommend running behind a VPN
- [22:54]
B
and you're definitely exposed to your end users. Right. Like the people that are connecting to you and using the Federation.
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A
Yeah, as long as you're not using a. If you're not using a vpn. So if you.
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B
Then they know your IP address.
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A
Yeah. If you run behind Mulvad, you don't make it that way. And that works pretty, pretty well. We've tested that for a while and.
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B
Awesome. Okay, so I mean, continuing on that track of start nine umbrell. So what's the deal? So then you released a separate Lightning gateway app for both as well or.
- [23:26]
A
Yeah, so that's, that's worth talking about because I think the last time we chatted that wasn't available yet.
- [23:35]
B
Right.
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A
So as, as you mentioned, like fediman is on chain native. It's like essentially the, the Bitcoin is held in a multi sig and the Lightning integration kind of comes from these, these gateways. So the gateway could be a different entity. It doesn't have to be the same person that's say running a guardian, but the gateway is what facilitates the lightning payments. So it, it integrates with Fedimint like sort of Via these in. They're, they're Fediman contracts, but they, they look very similar to hdlcs.
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B
Okay.
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A
Essentially where you're just sending an outgoing payment, what the client does is it creates what, what looks like a HTLC but it's enforced by the federation. So it's like an E cash HTLC essentially. Right. And then, then the client says hey Gateway, go go pay this invoice for me. It does that gets the pre image back and then the gateway can go reclaim the, the E cash that's held in that, in that htlc, that funding.
- [24:43]
B
Yeah. So you're not, you're not trusting the gateway with custody of funds.
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A
Correct.
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B
You're trusting the gateway with uptime. Like I'm a user and I want to make a lightning payment. If the gateway doesn't have sufficient liquidity, then my payment will fail.
- [24:56]
A
Yeah.
- [24:56]
B
If the gateway is offline, my payment will fail. But then the gateway, if it's not a guardian member, is trusting the guardian with custody of funds. Right?
- [25:05]
A
Yeah, exactly. The gateway is like, you can think of it just like a special wallet. It's just a client and the only way that it's special is that it can do, it can like facilitate these, these lightning payments. Yeah, it's a, it's a different type of model than like what Cashew is.
- [25:24]
B
Just like there's one guy who's running the mint and it has an, it has a, you know, a, a built in lightning node.
- [25:30]
A
Right, that's it. Right, yeah. And on Fedimint. Well one, one advantage of the, the gateway way is that there's gateways can serve multiple federations. If again given the trust model as long as you, you trust them. But so there's a bit of like capital efficiency there. You can sort of reuse your out, you know, outgoing and incoming lighting channels.
- [25:52]
B
Yeah. The dream, the dream is at scale that you'd have, you know, either straight up professional or quasi professional gateway operators.
- [26:01]
A
Right.
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B
That are like seeing opportunities in terms of demand for gateway services with growing federations.
- [26:08]
A
Yeah.
- [26:09]
B
And then you can just not only the users but also the guardians are basically outsourcing this expertise and this capital management. Right. It's not running a high. Like people love Phoenix Wallet. Like those guys deserve so much credit for running the Async node. I don't think everyone, no one appreciates it unless their payment fails. But as long as their payment's working, no one appreciates it. And it's, it's way more difficult of a problem and way more expensive in Terms of capital lockup than people realize.
- [26:40]
A
Yeah, exactly. That's kind of core to the architecture here is that we want to make running the federations like stupid easy essentially just set up and then you leave it. Versus the gateway operators. Yeah probably do need to be. They need to be as sophisticated as a lightning operator. They need to be able to run a high quality uptime with good liquidity Lightning node which yeah is not, not maybe super easy but getting easier with you know, agents and stuff like that.
- [27:11]
B
It is cool that on the Fediman side because it's on chain native you do have like if the gateway is just being completely unreliable, you do have basically like a break glass method of getting out on chain which Cashew does not have. Like if you, if your Cashew Mint does not have liquidity in their lightning node then you're just stuck until they have liquidity.
- [27:31]
A
Yeah. And I think it's pretty common for at least the federations that I've seen to have multiple gateways.
- [27:39]
B
Okay.
- [27:40]
A
Which is also same, same deal. It's a availability improvement because say one is having liquidity issues. You can switch to the other one. And that was one thing we added in an E Cash app if people are curious. I don't think Fedde shows this but in Ecach app you can change which gateway you use.
- [28:00]
B
You can manually choose.
- [28:02]
A
You can. It'll select one for you but then if you want to switch it you, you can.
- [28:06]
B
If it selects one for you and that one goes offline, does it automatically gracefully switch the other yet?
- [28:14]
A
Yeah, it should I believe so I think check what it should.
- [28:18]
B
I think a lot of these UX things were like it requires, you know, personal responsibility, an understanding by the user like which gateway I want to choose or which mint and stuff. I think there's something there about very low powered local AI models making a lot of these decisions for people. I think it like if you just, you're like basically like asking your agent like okay, like pick the right mint, pick the right gateway kind of thing. I don't pretend it's there yet, but it's something I think about a decent amount.
- [28:45]
A
Yeah, I think that that'd be useful for both like UI and, and agents. Right. Just to have some of that data to show people. Yeah, that's probably, we'll probably try to work on that over the next couple months.
- [28:59]
B
So I have one more question for you on the gateway side. So what does the pairing process look like? I install the gateway app on my, the Lightning gateway app on my start 9. How do I hook it into a federation? Does that. I assume that requires permission by the Guardians. How does, what does that look like?
- [29:18]
A
Yeah. So first thing to do is set up your, your lightning node. You install the gateway on, on start nine. You can use either your L and D node or the built in LDK that we have. So if you have L and D, you can reuse use that. Otherwise you can start a new lighting node after that. Yeah, you have to join a federation. So similar to if you had like any cash app, you have to have an invite code. So you have to join a federation and then get some ecash. So you have to do a peg in and specifically because it's the gateway, you're the one providing the lighting payments. It has to be an on chain payment. Then after that you're funded and yeah, then you give in the ui. There will be like, it's like called gateway endpoints little card and that will show you your Iro endpoint. It'll look like Iro colon//, then a launch pub key. You give that to the guardians and they, they register, they have like a little form in their ui, they register it there and at that point you're like advertising that you're providing.
- [30:27]
B
So you're giving that to them out of band. You're basically like asking them, can I be your gateway and let's connect it out of band. Okay, that makes sense. And I assume a lot, at least right now, a lot of times the gateway is also a guardian, that's my understanding.
- [30:46]
A
So I run a gateway for a handful of federations. So I've done that for a number of federations that have reached out to me. But yeah, it's just the same trust model. And like you said earlier, the reason why it's somewhat permissioned is that it's an availability thing. Yeah, you want to add gateways that will have a high quality of service and not.
- [31:12]
B
Yeah, I mean you could just. It's like the easiest deal DOS vector ever if you just leave it open. And I'm just not running any liquidity and pretending I'm a gateway. When you mentioned one gateway, that gives me another question. If a gateway operator is operating two federations, gateways on two federations and there's a payment between the two does is it just not even a lightning payment, is it just like internal ledger?
- [31:39]
A
Correct? Yeah, it does.
- [31:40]
B
That's awesome. That's a huge capital efficiency.
- [31:43]
A
Yeah, exactly. And not to like, not to get into many details, but we have, we actually have two Lightning protocols as well, we have what's called LNV1 and LNV2, and LNV2 is sort of our upgrade, which the new federations will support, but we also do swaps between those two. So, like, if you have an old client that doesn't speak the new protocol yet and the gateway does, the gateway will do the swap for you and pay a new client from an old client. So yeah, the gateway provides kind of a nice little upgrade path there as well.
- [32:19]
B
That's awesome. Okay. Running a Guardian on an Android device.
- [32:28]
A
Yeah.
- [32:29]
B
How does that look? Why would I do that?
- [32:33]
A
So it works exactly the same way the project started from. We were just trying to show like, how could we show cool ways about IRO and running a Guardian? And the insight is like, because it does hole punching, you can kind of run it, run it anywhere. And given that the resource requirements to running a Guardian are pretty low, you don't need a lot of memory or disk or anything. You need access to blockchain data like Bitcoin D or Espora. And yeah, you need to run this server. So we essentially just wrapped like Phetomond inside a Flutter app that has like a bridge to Rust code and it runs in a, like Android foreground, like a foreground task. So it has to. There's like a special permission that's like, hey, this thing, this thing always has to run and it will run in the background and it like warning it. It is like pretty.
- [33:40]
B
It'll run in the background as a foreground.
- [33:43]
A
Yeah, yeah. Essentially when you, when you move the app down or exit out, it doesn't go away. It's still, still running. And yeah, it's, it's relatively data and power hungry because it has to participate in this consensus thing. Right. So it's sending. Even if you're not actively doing transactions, it will be sending update data to the other guardians to like let it know it's still live and participating kind of thing.
- [34:08]
B
Yeah.
- [34:10]
A
So why would you want to stay
- [34:11]
B
in sync with each other?
- [34:12]
A
Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's, that's why it's. They're doing that. So. Yeah. Why would you want to run one of these? Well, essentially it just makes it really, really easy for running a Guardian. Like you can right now, you can go to Zap Store, download the app, and in like three taps you can have a federation with just one Guardian. And then if you, if you want to do a setup with multiple, you can just use the scanning QR code thing to exchange the, the setup codes and then hit go and it, and it will set it up for you.
- [34:47]
B
So wait, I mean that's awesome. So, so, so you could, a small community or whatever could have their, their Federation could be 4 older cheaper Android phones constantly plugged into power connections to WI fi.
- [35:02]
A
Yeah.
- [35:03]
B
With just a QR scan setup. Obviously they still need a lightning gateway.
- [35:09]
A
They still need a gateway. So I, what you just said. I'm. I'm currently doing. Right now I have like four pixels that I'm running a signet federation on. So if anyone's curious I can, I can send that around.
- [35:22]
B
Any like performance negatives versus in in best case scenario is it like three people are running them on vpss or start nines and like one person's running on Android phone. Is there.
- [35:39]
A
I don't have any like hard numbers on that.
- [35:41]
B
It's hard to test that. I don't know how you work.
- [35:43]
A
Yeah, I'd say, I mean from a, from a gut perspective, I'd say yeah, it's probably better to run more on servers. The, the Moby Mint federation that I'm running. The Pixel, it's a Mutiny federation. I haven't, I use that for just like development testing and I haven't noticed really any like perf degradation. It. It's pretty fast and it's. Yeah, as long as my, my phones are plugged in, I. There's been a few times where I you know, forget to plug a phone in and it dies and I. We have one. One less guardian.
- [36:17]
B
But as long as it's just one, then you just plug it in and turn it back on, right?
- [36:20]
A
Yeah, exactly. And it also makes like moving your guardian around really easy. Like if you want, if you want to start a federation on a phone, what you can do, as long as you have multiple guardians, you can take your backup TAR file and move it to a different. You can move it to a server and then extract that and run it from there and it will just work too.
- [36:44]
B
So you can switch.
- [36:46]
A
So you can switch. Yeah. And that the app, the phone app actually has like native support for that. It's like when you set it up it asks you like do you want to restore from a, from a backup file? If you click that, it will just unpack it and then start. Start going. So that's awesome. Yeah, it's again just the idea is to lower the bar as low as possible as far as running one of these things. So I think you know, getting an old phone, downloading the app and just like keeping it plugged in is pretty, pretty low bar Keep it in a closet somewhere. As long as it is still running, it will work.
- [37:30]
B
So you said obviously it's not running a bitcoin node, right. So I guess by default you said it's using Esplora. Is that like Blockstream API?
- [37:42]
A
Basically it's configurable. So in the setup, if you set up a while you're setting up the garden and it will ask you do you want to use Explorer? If you want to use Bitcoin D, so Bitcoin D is supported and if you so say you're running like a Bitcoin d node on start9, like on your local network, as long as that has the right port open, you can point it at that thing and that should work as well. But we have some sane defaults in there. So if you want to set up via Explorer, there's a link already in the app that will just let you sort of tap through it and it'll use Explorer by default if you do that.
- [38:26]
B
But what is that like blockstreet? Esplora is an open source project, right?
- [38:31]
A
Mempool. Yeah, Mempool Space.
- [38:33]
B
Mempool Space, Got it.
- [38:34]
A
Yeah.
- [38:35]
B
Interesting. I mean, I think that's a decent trade off balance. Yeah, that's pretty cool. What about mobile versus WI Fi? Have you tested it on mobile or. I guess it doesn't matter. It's just the data cap thing. Right. And how good your connection is.
- [38:55]
A
Yep, I have, I have tested it on both. It, it works. I like. Yeah, it's really all I can say. I don't know, like I haven't measured anything, but I did, I had it on. Yeah, I like took one of the phones and I had it on data and I took it out like outside, you know, my house outside of WI Fi. And it was, it got hot. It got hot in my pocket. So it was definitely, you know, kind of burning through a lot of, a lot of data. But yeah, it works.
- [39:31]
B
Cool. I mean. So I have a couple more questions. The. The hype of the day is agentic payments.
- [39:42]
A
Yeah.
- [39:45]
B
And I like to remind freaks that it's not just agents paying agents, but it's humans paying agents and agents paying humans and agents paying agents who are paying humans. Where do you think Fediment falls in that conversation?
- [40:00]
A
Yeah, we've been playing around with this a little bit. I think there's still more exploration to be done. I think Ecash in general is actually pretty well positioned. My thoughts are like, it's great to give your agent like a lightning node and it can definitely, probably Handle dealing with the liquidity.
- [40:23]
B
Definitely the smarter models.
- [40:25]
A
Yeah, yeah. But if you don't have to like why, you know, why. Why do that? And I think, you know, both with, you know, phytamin and cashew, it's kind of the lightning part is already outsourced. So giving your, giving your agent, it. It might just be a little easier.
- [40:40]
B
That's.
- [40:40]
A
That's all. One, one other thought I had on that was. Which is not specific to Fetiman but like in. In general with ecash mints is. I don't know about you, but like I said, the. I've run into a decent amount of problems with like open claw, like forgetting about stuff. And I, I felt when I was like looking into doing this, I felt a little uncomfortable. Like I'm just going to give you a seat phrase and like let you go go crazy. So like, I think, I think ecash in general, like you can especially maybe with the. The phone app, it's like pretty easy to set up your own. If you can set up your own mint and then just give your. Give your agent like an E cash wallet actually might be the.
- [41:26]
B
Do you do that by giving him sats? Like you just don't give them all the sats.
- [41:30]
A
Yeah, yeah, that's fair. I think what I was getting at is like you could. If you have the mint already set up and you give them like an E cash wallet, if they like screw up and like overwrite the wallet or it's gone or whatever, you can always just rug your own mint and take it back. So it's kind of.
- [41:46]
B
Oh, you kind of have an undo button. Yeah, because I kind of did this without the undo button when I was first experimenting with openclub. Cause I just had to make an npub cash cashew wallet, which I think uses the mini bitsmith by default. But then he had a lightning address. And then like I sent up a hundred thousand sats like and if you screwed it up, then I lost 100,000 sats like I was. Is the Titanic approach. But I see what you're saying here. This is more like you have a little bit of an undo button. At least if it stay. If the payments are staying within the mints. Within the mint.
- [42:20]
A
Right. Yeah. Obviously if the agent like pays a lighting invoice, you know that that money's gone, no recourse. But if he, if he like for some reason, like loses the database or something. Yeah, you could, you could get it back.
- [42:34]
B
So I mean, one thought I have is. I mean, it's yet to be seen. And you know, a lot of our speculations will just look retarded in the future. But that's the fun part. That's why I like the bleeding edge shit. You know, the dream of Fediman to me was always sold as like empowering local communities.
- [42:53]
A
Yeah.
- [42:55]
B
I still think I actually disagree with a lot of people in the Federman space in that. I also think it can be incredibly useful as a very large global mint, which I think we might see at scale. But if we just drill down really quick into the local community part and empowering local communities and community banking, obviously I think there's a lot of optimism and hope for good reason in local AI models. I think some of it is misguided and it's very like you send out a tweet and you're like everyone's going to be able to just run awesome intelligence on their phone for free and not have to pay anthropic or share their information. Is there's, there's a piece of truth in there and then there's a lot of. And so there's something to be said with. I've heard Obi talk about this on the Fedi side, you know that it's that what they're trying to build is more than just the money piece for empowering communities. And I can imagine a situation where the Guardians are running this fetiman for their local community and then maybe they're running some beefed up hardware with an open source model running on it that they're able to then provide to their, to their fediment community. So it's like I'm a, I'm a small village or whatever. We have our community bank but then they're also administrating the local models for you. And then I mean ecash for tolls is like super simple and you can just do ecash internally for like API calls or whatever to hit the model. Kind of interesting.
- [44:33]
A
Yeah, that, that's a really interesting direction I think. I think like Jesse Posner's like bora. They're doing stuff like that with like locally hosted nodes and whatnot.
- [44:47]
B
But I don't think he has the community piece like his is like a start nine with more security.
- [44:56]
A
Right.
- [44:57]
B
Like I, I think it's still like more family focused. Right. It's like you're doing it for your family. But yeah, I mean it's, it's tangential, it's, it's easy for him to connect that if he wants to open it up for people.
- [45:10]
A
Yeah, I Always see like Fediman as kind of the. It's like scaling up Uncle Jim to the community level and it's like Mayor Jim. Yeah, Mayor Jim. I don't think we're probably not quite there yet with, with LLMs. Right. As far as. Oh, definitely not the ability like share it within your community. But yeah, it's something I'd love to see. I know. So we've, we've definitely gotten some. I was gonna mention like there's a. There's. I won't mention my name but there's a community in South Africa that's been like uptaking Fedimin and using it more for their daily expenses and as a daily driver kind of thing. And yeah, they've gotten a lot of people using it and it's. It's been cool to see the uptake there. So it's definitely hopefully happening, you know, scaling up slowly but need that time to build the tools too. So
- [46:07]
B
yeah, I find it fascinating. Gradually then suddenly freaks. Okay, so before, before we wrap. What's next? What are you excited about? Good question.
- [46:15]
A
So we have a bunch of stuff coming soon I think want to play around with more agentic stuff. Personally interested in like the. On the gateway side for managing a lightning node, you know we talked a lot about it requires a bit of a more sophisticated operator and I think yeah, agents should probably be able to do that pretty well. So we've been making a bunch of changes to make the gateway a bit more driven by agents. We also have some new modules coming for fediman. So modules are kind of like our. You can think of them as consensus upgrades. They're new implementations of how fediment works. So there's a lot of nice improvements in that but we'll try to do it kind of in a, in a backwards compatible way so that most of the complexity is handled by the clients like the wallet developers versus you know, needing to totally redeploy everything.
- [47:21]
B
Right.
- [47:24]
A
Yeah, that's. That's the main stuff. We're going to try to start implementing some bolt 12 stuff as well. Coming like Fediman there has some unique challenges but we'd like to get some, some Bolt 12 support coming soon as well.
- [47:35]
B
What are the unique challenges
- [47:39]
A
on the send side? Not, not so much. It's more on the receive side in the main challenge is that with the trust model is a little bit shifted where both 12 is non interactive by the end client. Right. So the. Whereas bolt 11 is not so in both 11 essentially for the way Federate works is we can create Essentially the receiver encrypts a pre image with the
- [48:14]
B
Federation so the gateway can't steal the money in transit.
- [48:17]
A
Yeah, exactly. So in order to do the same thing for, for bolt 12 we. It's. It's very difficult. Bolt 12 like trust model wise for Fedimid looks similar, more similar to ln URL. I think it might be possible to do it if we had like PTLCs where like the federation could like commit to a point that is then revealed as like the right. The payment. But PTLCs are not quite, not quite there yet. So that might be a. Be a ways off but.
- [48:51]
B
And what the trust model is that the gateway can steal money right in transit.
- [48:58]
A
It's similar to ln URL or like the gateway can sort of do these like amount attacks where it only gives the like a lower amount than what the gateway is getting paid to the end user. So and the siphon. And it's hard for the end user to, to know which. Of course you can do this in an ln URL right now as well,
- [49:18]
B
but who's ever running your Lightning address server basically can do it.
- [49:21]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [49:23]
B
Like in Primal situation, like I have odell@primal.net and it's supposed to map to my Spark Wallet or whatever, but there's a trust element there, right?
- [49:34]
A
Yep, yep. And we do.
- [49:36]
B
Yeah, yeah, go on.
- [49:37]
A
Well, we have, we have lighting address and ecash out and it's the same, the same model. So yeah, we'd like to get both 12 at some point but we might start with that trust model and then you know, once some of the other improvements are in place we'll try to make it.
- [49:51]
B
I mean I think one of the. That's one of those things that's like. Yeah, it'd be great to mitigate it and improve the trust model but also like in practice it's not too big of a risk to the user.
- [50:03]
A
Yeah.
- [50:04]
B
I mean particularly since in this situation, in your situation, gateways are permissioned and need permission from the guardian to, to operate anyway.
- [50:15]
A
Right.
- [50:16]
B
And obviously the user's trusting the guardians in the first place when they're using fediment. So I think it's one of those things that in practice probably isn't that big of a deal.
- [50:26]
A
Yeah, I, I agree with that. That's why we're going to do it. So yeah, I just take a little bit of time.
- [50:32]
B
Awesome. I. How can the audience be helpful?
- [50:38]
A
Download Download Ecash app. Download the fedima D mobile app. Give it a. Give it a whirl and give me some feedback if anyone or any Federman feedback would be great. I'm on Noster at Mr. Cool Guy and yeah, I don't know more feedback on usage and feedback would be. Would be great.
- [50:56]
B
So yeah, I'll tag you in the, tag you in the Noster post of course and I'll put all relevant links in the show Notes freaks and just FYI and it's obviously not pressing but I think you need to do something to have it available on 040 of Start9, their big update.
- [51:19]
A
We're. Yeah, we're working, we're working on that. We, we have, we had a draft. We had some initial work working towards that and that will be. Yeah, hopefully happening soon as well.
- [51:29]
B
While I have you. How significant is that change having to Update an app to 040?
- [51:34]
A
I wasn't, I didn't, I didn't do that. It didn't look too, I looked through
- [51:38]
B
the code just briefly.
- [51:39]
A
It didn't look too bad but I wasn't the one that did. Did the work for that. So I don't know all the pain points there but yeah, hoping it's smooth. The new 4040 looks, looks great so we definitely want those.
- [51:53]
B
Yeah, it's great. I've been running it so I'll have Matt Hill on of Start nine sometime soon to discuss but they just, they've been working on this update. It's like significant, significant Update for like 2 years now I think and it's finally in beta right now. You have to manually flash it onto your Start 9 with the USB drive. You can't. There's not like a big update button. But in the future there'll be a big update button. They're just slow rolling it right now. I don't know what the timeline is of that. I asked Matt what the timeline of it it was and he responded back to me to get a USB drive. So I, I bought my like 30th flash drive. I know for a fact that I have, you know, 30 plus flash drives in this house and moving and stuff. For the life of me, I can't find any single flash. I'm going to find a bunch of them after I bought this one but I wasn't able to find them.
- [52:42]
A
Yeah, they're always running away because you
- [52:44]
B
never throw out a flash drive. No, it's one of those things that's like a seed words, you know, it's like you just have a drawer full of empty wallets.
- [52:52]
A
Well then you plug them in years later and see what operating system or whatever you were running like a long time ago. It was on there.
- [53:01]
B
Blast from the past. Anyway, Justin, this was great. I would love to do another update in like a year or so. Keep grinding. You guys have made really massive progress. Progress. You should be proud. I think there's a decent amount of haters out there that wrote off the Federman open source project as all hype and no substance and I think you guys have been proving them wrong. So it's been beautiful to see.
- [53:23]
A
Well, thank you very much. I appreciate that.
- [53:26]
B
Thank you Freaks. I hope you enjoyed the show as always. All relevant links are still dispatch.com Share with your friends and family. Love you all. Stay humble. Stack sets Peace.