Nick Slaney

David Bailey really did it All the buckling up was worth it 🥹

If I were wanting to make a big impact on bitcoin payments and I was working with big fintech apps with Bitcoin capability. I’d ship Pay to lightning from fiat. Buy / send out in one step (after confirmation of course) - no btc exposure for people who don’t want it - maximal compatibility globally - further shores up the access argument. Big fintechs can make this happen for many users

Ideas are meaningless without execution and the ability to follow through. If you’re only able to copy someone else, you’re always a step behind.

How can c= generate such a return with just routing? Lightning liquidity is the most underestimated part of the network. It’s part of what we solve at moneydevkit, but here’s a bit about how we did it at Block 1. Real transactions. Cash is one of the biggest lightning services on the network. It connects millions to lightning, and as Miles pointed out, more and more people are using it everyday. By nature of cash being custodial, we had insights into what people were using lightning for. This was part of the original thesis of c=. There are some big players out there that node runners have no idea about 🤷🏻‍♂️. Lightning privacy works very well. Apologies monero trolls. 2. Liquidity in our favor Most people buy bitcoin on cashapp and withdraw (based) That transaction flow is ideal for lightning, and in the right hands, you can flex it to pay for and make a handsome return on your own payments and operations. For the plebnet inclined— c= is an inbound generator. For its capacity it’s typically had 1-3X+ more inbound than outbound. This is a very unique position on the network. 3. Strategy The management the team did not only improved the experience for Cash users, it compounded payments and fees going through our channels. We expected to get some return, but we were pretty blown away by the volumes and takes. The ROI we collected was not from Cash. This was just step 0.5. The next steps were to flex our position and liquidity to bolster bigger and higher value things. One of those was Square. In the end, the real value comes from real people making real payments. It’s why I’ve always harped on this: We don’t need X protocol or Y L2. The technology is there. We need to do the hard part of bringing it to real people now. For you nostr folks consider— on-chain fees were never even a thought in our minds. Our margins were fat.

Huge shout out to the c= team, I wish I could be there celebrating with you. 10% ROI on Block's bitcoin and building the first Square lightning integration are huge accomplishments and hard won. Both unprecedented, I am so proud of all of you. We put together an amazing team and did exactly what we set out to do. I am so happy some of this work finally gets to see the light of day. Teams that start from nothing and put out the results you did are rare and extremely valuable. Most startups only dream of hitting $1M ARR. This is the work that makes the dream happen. Considering what it took, you guys are miracle workers. It's my sincere hope that work like this can shine through more often at Block unimpeded.

Congrats to the team that built this. A huge accomplishment. This is how it starts. nostr:note1xsyrc5tx34lfeq03hw03cqh0v539rf0ptdqvxgean52nmum8cjwqmggl9j

People do not want to “be on chain” they just want to do normal things. There is no UX path that starts with “well first they will learn crypto with stablecoins and then…” The first part of that statement is already garbage.

From: Nostr

The death of Nostr Wallet Auth is a tragedy, can we bring it back? Mutiny had taken NWC and made it the best way to do "pull" style bitcoin payments for subscriptions and other things. Reading through the NIP proposal where nostr:npub1u8lnhlw5usp3t9vmpz60ejpyt649z33hu82wc2hpv6m5xdqmuxhs46turz tried to share this nice bit of UX with the nostr community was a trip down open source spec hell and it has ended in it withering on the vine. https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips/pull/851 Their blog post about it here https://blog.mutinywallet.com/nostr-wallet-auth/ Everyone expects pull when they pay. An entire industry of SaaS apps is built on users putting in their cc info and forgetting about it for months. We need the same if bitcoin payments will be a thing.

Hi Nostr, Launching soon— https://moneydevkit.com Stripe is the de facto payment solution for developers but theres entire swaths of the globe that aren’t served by it. Similarly, everyday people with legitimate businesses get their payments turned off by stripe because the traditional financial system doesn’t want to serve them. Money Dev Kit is the easiest way to get started taking payments online. Easier than stripe. No onboarding or approvals. 170 countries. Your payments are yours. Under the hood, it’s self-custody and lightning. None of the headache, nodes channels etc. The interface will be truly stripe level and better. After working in lightning for the past few years, the hidden alpha on the network is there are plenty of people sending and able to send payments, but there’s a shortage of people receiving them. Underserved devs are using AI to make the future of the internet, and this will be by far the easiest way for them to receive those payments. Sign up for the mailing list for early access when we launch

Stablecoins being denominated in $ does not make them easier to use or for people to pick up Stablecoins have the same friction of Bitcoin, if you want real $ that you can buy groceries with, you have to buy / sell them. And don’t get me started on all the different chains, bridges, gas fees etc. Taxes are another thing, but I doubt people are sitting around saying “if only I didn’t have to use bitcoin.tax I would be spending Bitcoin right now” Similarly, very few people are saying “I would spend in crypto if only there was something just like dollars” they are just using dollars. For those who are not able to use dollars, bills like the genius act are adding kyc to make sure they can’t use stablecoins for payments anyway. Long term, Bitcoin is more universal, has more liquidity, and with improving tools and applications, will be easier to use than even dollars and bank accounts, let alone stablecoins spread across multiple chains each with their own peculiarities

If someone asked who I was voting for I made it a point to tell them that the Biden administration was specifically putting people in jail in my industry because they didn’t like it. It was a vote either for people who were actively putting people like me in jail, or the ones that actually were throwing us a bone. nostr:note1vaal3w4gjqftx38t3mmy75pg3ae8hqw2rv3tw44jrr45uk2gp40sx6fvff

What happened to Nostr Wallet Auth? Why do I see the worst open source dev hell when I try to find out if this is a nip now? This was the best way to connect with nwc by far, and it looks like the spec was nitpicked to death for no reason