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

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.

Hi Nostr, Launching soon—

moneydevkit — The payments platform for vibe-coders and agents

moneydevkit is the payments platform for vibe-coders and agents. Add checkout, subscriptions, webhooks, and agent wallets to your apps in minutes.

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

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. View quoted note →

I was sad to see Nick Szabo sign off in 2021. It’s good to see him back in the fray somewhere. Don’t take the old heads for granted. Many have come and gone 🫡

I need to zap again. How are people zapping in 2024 post apple zap take down?

@calle cultivating his anti Calle bluesky persona

How does a protocol play differ from a platform play? Platform Play - we own the ecosystem - you connect through our own APIs - you play in our sandbox - we decide who gets to play (fragile) - if we go down, you go down Protocol Play - we play a part in a larger ecosystem - you use open source code for your use case - you can use our services, or anyone else’s (but ours are the best) - we decide who uses our services (no one decides who uses the protocol) - the ecosystem’s growth is not limited by us Protocol plays are the future, they’re not controlled or limited by any one entity, they are bigger than the sum of their parts Platforms are monopolies, will likely be treated as such in the future. Platforms don’t have the growth / access potential that protocols do. Since platforms are monopolies, they become captured and corrupted over time

Not spending your bitcoin when it 20Xs in purchasing power is a very rare thing

Bitcoin has always been about self-custody

We need to reclaim sankey diagrams for good

Doug bf pepper ann gf

This was an idea I threw on here a while ago, I think it has legs, but like most things nostr needs to be open source. I fleshed out the idea more and am putting it out here before I try to ChatGPT it into reality

GitHub

GitHub - npslaney/nostrtok

Contribute to npslaney/nostrtok development by creating an account on GitHub.

Video is the way most consume content now a days and it’s about time YouTube and TikTok got disrupted. A protocol like this would- - pay creators directly - distribute and potentially pay for hosting - potentially be very easy to onboard onto as a creator or consumer of content We have a good set of primitives to build this, and I think the incentives line up to make it work. I think something like this turns nostr into a 🚀

This has been said before but not enough. Do you think we will have digital money someday? True internet currency? If you do (are we going to print bills and make coins forever? Maybe actually), there are two ways to do it. 1) the fed makes a money database (CBDC) 2) decentralized open protocol (Bitcoin) 1 is the naive way to go. The fed makes money now, and has some sort of ledger for the banks it deals with. Just extend that to everyone. The reason why it is naive is the unprecedented power that puts in the hands of the gov’t. Every txn and account balance visible, full discretion over access. The founding fathers couldn’t ever conceive of a way to have that much control. An unelected official could take away the ability for someone to buy food in an instant with no due process. Less obvious, imagine a market regulator having insight into the exact balances, P/Ls of all of the industry players they regulate. You think insider trading / lobbying in congress is bad now? 1 is true and total control. I don’t think most (including in the US gov) really want this? I also don’t think most people understand the implications of 1, especially if it’s packaged as “safe, trusted, just like dollars, fair” 2 is the opposite. Maximum access, no central control, but bad guys will use it. I really liked Natalie Smolenski’s talk at the bitcoin policy summit recently Is there an in between? This is much like the encryption debate— you can’t have backdoored encryption to make sure bad guys don’t use it. The backdoors will be used against the good guys / everyone. Half encryption is no encryption. In a digital currency system, the same principle applies. Bitcoin and lightning built on top of it use cryptography at their core. To try to police or patrol either at the protocol level is to break the things that make them neutral and valuable in the first place. Might as well use the database. This is the fundamental issue we face today. I worry most people won’t realize the importance until it’s too late.

We need a 4A lobby that’s as strong as the 2A lobby

I’ve seen many Bitcoin influencers come and go at this point. Generally skeptical of people who just talk about bitcoin (there is only so much to say). End up unfollowing most. Wrong motivations, wrong incentives, weird outcomes.

The real way to get the normies to nostr is a wordle derivative

Geopolitical skill issue View quoted note →

Technical debt jubilee