CD113: ZEUS with Evan Kaloudis

What is up, freaks? It's your host, Odell, here for another Citadel Dispatch,

the interactive live show

focused on Bitcoin and Freedom Tech.

We have ride or die freak and many time guest here on dispatch, Evan

Kaludes,

founder and maintainer of of Zeus. How's it going, Evan? Great. Great, Matt. Sup, freaks?

It feels

so good to be back. It's

been a while. Right?

It has. It has. I don't I'm not Stefan Lavera, so I do not know which episode was your last episode.

But,

it feels like it's been, like, 5 or 6 months.

Yeah. It's been quite a while. I think it might be longer than that even.

But, yeah, tell me this. Did anyone beat my my record? I just What is your record? I don't know. I feel like I've been on, like, 8 or 9 shows now.

Yeah. I mean, in the beginning, you were just like,

you were my my go to guest. Like, if I if I if I when you do, like, a fill fill the group or whatever, it's, like, oh, have him join me join me this week. You're almost you're almost a cohost in the beginning. I felt like I think, like, first, like, 5 episodes you were in or something like that.

Yeah. It was great, and it's just been amazing to see

the show grow. You got your own studio now. You've had incredible content, amazing guests.

I mean,

It's been great. We should start with the heavy hitting stuff. I know you've been disappointed that I removed,

I no longer end shows with copyright infringement.

I know you're a big music head.

Yeah. I am.

So well, you know, it's more important to make sure that the content can proliferate.

We can just tag our YouTube videos afterwards. You know?

Did you see

it just became a real pain in the ass. It was like something that it was like every time I just get a fucking copyright flag every fucking time. It's crazy the copyright game, like, so some people who know a little bit about me, I started up like a music blog in high school, and we still run it to this day. It's called beatsperminute.com.

We post, like,

music reviews,

live features, like reviews of shows.

And, you know, someone,

like, attempted to to sue us or or they did sue us for posting a copyrighted picture, like,

for an image, for promoting a ban. Like,

the whole cop the copyright game is is absolutely

bonkers. So,

yeah, I I understand,

you know, all the scrutiny you went through. And, you know, what fun is it? Or, like, what's what's the point in putting on all this work to do your shows if people can ultimately, like, not listen to them on YouTube? That stinks.

So Yeah. It was like there was 2 different versions because I just,

I would still I would include the music in the podcast feed,

but it it wouldn't be on, like, the YouTube rewatch. Sometimes, actually, if I pick too long of a song, like, YouTube would cut the stream.

That's the filters would get would be hit. Yeah. Yeah. That's unfortunate. Okay. Well, on that note too,

you might also remember

I used to put CNBC clips in the beginning

of every or, like, mainstream news clips as, like, a time stamp in the beginning of every episode.

Those got hit too? Well, some freaks asked me,

now that that caps Odell is back, does that mean we're gonna get CNBC clips at the beginning of episodes? And maybe maybe we will.

During the bear market, there was pretty there the clips were pretty poor, and it was hard to find, like, good clips. But it already looks like

Joe Joe Kern and,

Sorkin on CNBC are are running running back their playbook of being the number one Bitcoin podcast in the world. So I mean Oh, man. So we did we survive? Is the is the bear market over?

Bear market's over. Capsodels out. No one's bullish enough.

Love it. Like it. I feel like it. Don't you feel like it? There's definitely been a lot of vibe shifts happening.

People have asked for Caps O'Dell to come back for years now,

and I've been I've been I don't wanna jump the gun. I've been kinda deliberate about it. So now

I I I I think so. I think I think,

I think this could be, like, the a an absolutely ridiculous cycle, and I look forward to,

shitposting with all the freaks on Noster throughout the whole process. It's gonna be fantastic. Let's see where it takes us. You're still on Twitter. Right?

Yeah. Unfortunately. Are you gonna give me a scolding? Because I I posted about the show on the Zeus account. I'm not angry. I'm just I I wrote I wrote, Matt is gonna be upset that you're all not on Noster, but I have to let you know about the Sizzell dispatch episode.

Look at the Noster live chat. It's almost all in caps too.

Yes.

Loving it. I,

no. I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed. You know? I just, I would like to see a little bit more civil disobedience from Bitcoiners,

and

going Noster only is a

relatively low lift civil disobedience,

move in comparison to history. I mean, at least for the Bitcoin space,

you know, there's so much great content there. The vibes are much better on Nastr.

And, you know, I just tip my hat to you. You've been quite on the nose with, you know, all your assessment of what's going on with Twitter and what Elon is trying to do.

And, you know, every move that gets made, it becomes abundantly clear what his end goal is. And, you know, it's just sad to see what became such a great platform. I think that's the first time we interacted

was on Twitter. It's really just

becoming the antithesis of, you know, what it started as. So it's really sad to see. But, you know, thankfully,

there's an exit door. There's an alternative, and

god bless

for giving us Nostr.

Damn right. Well, to wrap up the Nostr conversation,

if you haven't used Nostr yet, go to primal.net

or damas.io.

Those are 2 great Nostril clients. You can use whatever Nostril client you want. Check it out.

And to the freaks that are in our live chat on YouTube and Twitch,

this is the first serial dispatch

where the only live chat that is being shown on screen is the Noster live chat. You can get to that by going to sidldispatch.com/stream.

So, Evan,

we're here to talk about Zeus.

You just had a really big release. You wanna

walk us through?

Yeah. Sure. Let's get let's get right into it. So

Zeus version 0.8.0,

beta 1 dropped on Monday morning. It's now available for everyone in the world to download.

It is available on our website. We've got a new blog out. We have set up a new Apple TestFlight,

and you can get it on GitHub right now. So this is not the final release. We're gonna be doing some refinements. It's hopefully gonna be out the door in December,

but it's now one point o?

Not quite. Not quite.

I mean, it effectively

can be argued that, like, this is the biggest jump in functionality Zeus is gonna have, but it's quite it's not quite up to my level of standard to say, okay. This is 1.0. We still have do the samurai thing where you're just gonna keep adding extra digits and letters?

What are they on? They're on, like, 0.99.99.

999bc

or is it?

Yeah. It's really easy to keep track of the releases that way, guys. Good job. You're running at you're running out of room, though, before you get to 1 point o. You guys Well, yeah. We'll see. I mean, maybe at some point, we'll jump

numbering schemes entirely. Like, Bitcoin Core changed their numbering scheme where they just, like,

pumped up everything, like, a In this case, they're not. They just, like, jumped to 21 or whatever. Right? Yeah. Yeah. They went from, like There was was it point it was, like, 0.20 to Yeah. It's a 21.

Yeah. So, maybe we'll do that. We'll see. That was during

CIDIL Dispatch. The episodes were always point or whatever, and then I

when when Bitcoin Core jumped, I also went to mainnet release. Gosh. There are no versioning rules. Okay? Like, we'll do whatever the hell we want.

Okay. Let let's get into it. The functionality,

0.8.

So, traditionally,

those who have used Zeus in the past, those who are using the App Store version,

the biggest constraint, the biggest barrier to entry to using the app was you having to come to the table with your own preconfigured node already,

either like a a home node behind your router at home or like a cloud node and maybe hosted by Voltage or something,

or you were using, like, an LND hub account, like, BlueWallet account, Albie account.

And those are, like, sort of not really using your own node. That's custodial solution. It's antithetical to why we're in this all anyway. Right. So we had to change that. Right? We had to lower the barrier to entry into using Bitcoin and lightning in a self custodial manner,

and, we think this release has done that in a big way.

First and foremost, with an embedded node, it is

a mobile LND node with a couple of

modifications

from the Zeus team, but you essentially get the full functionality

that you would get as if you were running a a full node at home or in the cloud, but now the node lives entirely on your phone in your pocket.

The node is in your phone?

It's in your phone. Yeah. So so

so Zeus has historically been a essentially, like, a remote control interface. It's Yeah. That's correct. And there really is no second best in that

in that niche. Like, many people who run nodes at home or run nodes in the cloud or whatever use Zeus to connect back. They have a great little interface. You can pay when you're on the go. You can do all this different stuff.

And you've improved that tremendously as well. I mean, the big thing to me was LND Connect

instead of, like, the Tor connection or whatever.

Yeah. For sure. So it makes it more reliable. But this sorry to cut you off.

This this that that will probably always be

and it's cool that you continue to maintain that and it can live in the same app.

But that will always be more of, like, a hardcore enthusiast

group, you know, like, the freaks. Like, most most of the people that listen to dispatch,

will be will continue to use that because they'll they want a full

Did I lose you, Matt? Users or the next a 1000000000 users,

they are probably only gonna use Bitcoin on their phone. Absolutely.

You you can't expect the new class of Bitcoiners to be coming in and having to get a Raspberry Pi or buy hardware,

set it up, or even expect them to buy

a subscription to have their node hosted on a monthly basis.

That's just unrealistic.

And, you know, there are people that are gonna do that and continue to do that, and we're gonna continue to support them. We're always gonna make sure that Zeus is an incredible remote controller, as you said.

But now it's time to move forward,

create the new iteration of the app, and we fully expect that, you know, this the most of our users moving forward are gonna be using this embedded node interface.

Okay. So,

so that is clearly the case. I think that that new users come in,

they they want a mobile first experience or a mobile only experience. And the end result that we've seen,

because of where lightning is at in its development cycles, but specifically, like, the apps that in you know, that that people interface with Lightning,

is that most people have been using custodial wallets. We see a ton of wallet as a Tosha usage. You met mentioned Alby. On Noster, Alby is very popular in terms of a custodial wallet.

Obviously, strike, like, a lot of people that's like a like a regulated KYC custodian, but a lot of people are using custodians,

just out of ease of use and convenience.

They're not it's not ideological.

It's not,

it doesn't matter how many YouTube videos you have and and,

tutorials and books and articles.

Like, people just will flock to the most convenient option. And what you what you've tried to do here, and you,

you know, even this first version

is is pretty fucking clean is is make a convenient option for people

that that still gives you

freedom and sovereignty

and

and and is is rug pull resistant instead of trusting a custodian. So you incorporate best practices

into an easy to use wallet. That's the key breakthrough. Right? Yeah. Absolutely. We have core values of promoting self sovereignty,

self custody, and privacy.

So we're creating everything in a way that we know as little about our users as possible. We don't have trackers in our app. The only analytics we really get is from people hitting our servers and using our services, opening channels to us.

We we are just we not only do we not want to know

how much money you have, how you're using your money, we're building things in a way that we can't know those things.

Right.

So, I mean, let's let's talk about this. So,

obviously, channel management is hidden from users.

Yep.

Because if people have to manage channels

I've

I've already managed too many channels for my life. Like, if people have to manage channels, you've already you've already lost.

And that is

a lot of this is possible because

you have a bundled LSP. So you're running this lightning service provider. You're essentially running

one or more nodes. I don't know how many nodes you're running that are providing liquidity to users and routing payments. Right? Yeah. So right now, we just have one super node.

We have some backup mechanism to spin up some other ones if we need, but right now, it's just a monolithic node. We might fragment stuff out

over time, but for now, it's just one great node.

So, basically, users by default will have

connection to our Lightning service provider. We will automatically

open up channels to you when you need them, and you let me worry about the liquidity and the connectivity to the Lightning Network. You just have to worry about making your payments and living your life.

So, I mean, you mentioned the word privacy there. I assume, like,

there's not much privacy here. Like, can't the can't you see all of my transactions

Which everyone does in the in the embedded wallet. Right? Right.

When you are receiving a payment and you wrap an invoice,

we will know

when that gets paid,

how much the amount is for.

We put in some precautions, though. We don't allow users to submit memos. We don't wanna know what these payments are for,

and we also don't know who's paying them just by how the Lightning Network functions. Like, there's no way of us knowing where that payment came from. We could determine where the last hop in the route was. Right? But we really don't know where it originated from.

And then on the other side of things, we don't know where our users are making their payments too. Since we allow the users to do all the route calculation when they're making a payment on device,

We have no idea

what users are doing with their money. Yeah.

So the user has better privacy sending than receiving?

Yeah. But there's a caveat there.

The lightning, the the LSP with the embedded node, the wrapped invoice, you can easily toggle that on and off at the top of the receive page. So if you wanna say, hey. We don't wanna run this payment

through Zeus. We're okay with giving out route hints or exposing our channels, exposing our pub key,

then you can do that. Everything is optional. Oh, but then you have worse privacy from the person paying you. Exactly. So privacy is not about

completely having an opaque barrier between yourself

and everyone.

It's about selectively revealing what information

you're going to reveal to perhaps your LSP, the sender. You gotta determine what makes sense for you and your situation.

But we are always building Zeus in a way that you have this flexibility

so that you can make those choices. If you don't wanna use our LSP, you could pop another one in. For the 1st multi LSP wallet, you could go and pop in the connection string for

voltage flow 2.0 today, or you could stick with Olympus. You don't wanna use an LSP, you can do that too. You still have the same functionality

to open and receive your own channels as you would with a remote node in Zeus.

It's pretty fucking awesome, dude.

So

one of the big things here is

one of the big things I have a bunch of things I wanna talk to you about. There's a lot. There's a lot to get to.

And I guess it's on the

so when you when you launch when you launch the node, when you launch the wallet, first of all, I don't

from a marketing I we're just gonna talk business on air.

From a marketing point of view, I don't like embedded node.

No one cares no one cares that the nodes in the phone,

like, this

I I I maybe

I'm not gonna speak in absolutes. I just spoke in absolutes, but there's, like, a dozen people that carry the nodes in the phone.

The overwhelming majority of users just wanna know that they have a lightning wallet that is hard to rug or is rug resistant, or

I don't know if it's unruggable because you're the LSP too.

Yeah. There's definitely a lot of

messaging challenges for sure, and there's

definitely better terminology we could come up with.

It's also difficult to balance with being, like, precise. And so this is called Zeus easy mode. So anyway Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So referring to this I'm gonna refer to the Zeus easy mode. When you're in Zeus easy mode,

you one of the one of the key things here is that,

you can have a lightning address and receive lightning address payments. And this is something that's the l n URL,

it's a human readable l n URL format,

that that allows for recurring payments. Right? And it's something that Noster uses,

for,

when when you're receiving payments on Noster, you put in your your lightning address. And, historically,

it's been very difficult to self host,

a light and not diff it's it's it adds friction to self host to Lightning address, so most people do not self host their Lightning address, and it pushes people towards custodians.

Yep. I believe Zeus is the first

mobile wallet that doesn't require a note at home or in the cloud or something

that allows you to easily set up a lightning address.

That's absolutely correct.

Which is massive.

Yeah.

Absolutely massive in terms of actual user demand for something like it. It to the point where, like, when I was onboarding someone to Nasr, it's like I didn't really have very I didn't have any easy suggestions for them,

and I refused to just offload them to Wala to Satoshi. So it's just like,

you know, here's

here's how you figure it out by doing voltage, and it's a pain in the fucking ass. Right?

So that's huge.

How are you doing that?

So it wasn't easy, and there are definitely some trade offs that we'll I'm sure we'll get into.

But, basically, we're hosting the infrastructure

for the users. The zoo servers are serving up

these invoices for the users,

and we're using the scheme that got devised by our very good friend, Supertestnet.

We're calling the scheme

ZapLocker.

And, basically, the gist of it is that the user generates

a pairing of

a hash or or preimage that unlocks a payment,

and they submit a hash of that preimage to the server. They submit a whole bunch of these that can be served up by us.

And, basically,

the zoo server or the zap blocker server, Our friend, Super, he's already also running his own web instance of this.

Basically serves up Huddl invoices

with 24 hour CLTV expiries

to the payers. Lightning payment,

your

if someone goes to pay

if someone goes into strike and types in odell@zeuspaydot

com and goes to pay me, it's a 24 hour pending payment.

Yes. That's correct. There's something called Huddl invoices that lightning supports. Correct. So Huddl invoices have had a lot of use cases before. We even use them for the LSP,

generation of channels.

But now we're using them for these

self custodial

trust minimized

Lightning addresses.

You can now have this human readable email looking string,

and you don't need to have your note on 247,

which is huge for service workers,

for no match, for dissidents,

for anyone who doesn't wanna spend time

setting up this remote infrastructure.

And not only does it work today with our embedded node, but you can also plug in a remote LND node and use the service as well.

So easy. Wait. Wait. So I could I could have instead of I wanted to, like, test out all the features. So, like, I hooked up my Odell at Zeus Pay to the easy mode wallet. I could have just done that to my

remote node as well that I have managed in Zeus. Yeah. So every account is linked to a specific,

seed or node.

So you can go ahead and create a second account.

But, you know, we it's part of it is semi trusted. We can move over your account.

I don't have to I don't have to change anything on my node at home

to have that functionality?

The only constraint right now is that it needs to be a LND node. So you can use the rest connection type. You can use LNC.

Finally a benefit.

But, yeah, basically, the fact is that LND is, like, the only back end with an interface that we have right now that lets us submit custom preimages that makes this whole scheme work. I'm locked into l and d. I got 200 channels on my main note. Like, mempools are never gonna clear again. By the way, has have people looked at mempools lately? They're

quite busy out there.

I'm not closing 200 channels and reopening them. Like, this is not gonna fucking happen. Did we did we so we gotta rewind real quick. Did the mempools clear out? No. No.

Interesting. But we got low in fees, Some one separate bites confirmed.

The overwhelming majority didn't.

And I I I expect that most of Gatan's transactions did not confirm

because odds were against you if you did 1 separate bite. If you did 2 separate bite, you definitely got

confirmed in there, like, a couple weeks ago.

But with the price pump,

I mean, it makes it even less I don't know. We'll see.

I expect mempools to not clear at some point,

but it's been 6 months without a clear right now. And I was kind of chastised when I first started saying it. So I I guess I think it's gonna become a running joke between Bitcoiners. Like, it's not gonna clear again.

There's not gonna be another. This is gonna be it as a cycle, but I don't know. We'll see.

So when we're talking about,

when we're talking about remote node versus

Zeus easy mode,

the the big the big issue

the big issue for

mobile lightning wallets

is that most of these, especially on iPhone,

there's very aggressive,

battery saving stuff that kills background tests. Yeah. So to receive, you need to be online on lightning in general.

Correct. And,

on mobile, that that makes it more difficult. Like, people don't realize, like, they're like, oh, my phone's always connected to the Internet.

Like, yeah. But, like, the app isn't.

So that's why the Huddl invoices are super important on easy mode

because the user just needs to open the app within 24 hours to receive the payment.

But

am I correct in thinking that if you if I connect it to my remote node, they'll just process? Like, I I don't have to because my node's online, or does the app still need to open?

If the app still needs to open to process it now,

maybe we'll add a piece of software that could be a one click on your Umbrel or star 9 down the road. But, yeah, right now,

it has to open up. But we're messing around with new stuff with the notification system we have. We're trying to make the node spin up and wake up when you get those notifications.

So, hopefully, in the near future, maybe not for 8.0,

but maybe 8.1, 8.2,

we'll have everything wake up in the background, and you're not gonna have to worry about a thing.

Yeah. On Android, it's much easier. Oh, yeah. With Android, we've got so much more we can do. We're working on a persistent mode. So if you wanna be a knot, you don't care about your battery.

You can say, hey. LND never shut down.

And I think that's gonna make for an awesome experience and will be a path forward for us to implement something like a Noster WalletConnect

and just make those zaps just a little bit of a better experience down the road.

But, yeah, expect that.

You see the comment from Daniel?

All caps until mempool's

clear. Sorry.

So

okay.

Okay. That makes sense to me. So you have to open the app within 24 hours. Yep.

Now when I when I when I generated my Zeus easy mode wallet,

it created a pair of nostril keys for me. Yep. And I can also put in my own nostril keys that I generated outside if I want to. What are those master keys used for?

So, basically, in this scheme that we have,

there is a lot of ways for the LSP

or us running Zeus Pay to mesh with you. We can serve

up invoices multiple times and have them paid and lie about them getting redeemed. We can lie about the amount

that is available for you to get redeemed.

Right. And we have this new

Noster attestation system that is part of the Zapplocker scheme

that is designed to help us

stay in check.

So, basically,

when you submit a noster secret key

to the app, it stays on the app. It doesn't get submitted to the to the zoo servers.

But, basically, you use that key

to sign

all of the payment hashes that you submit to the service.

So someone paying

your Zap and your Zeus Pay

account from the Zeus Wallet

will be able to also load up the pertinent Noster information

that's served up to you too.

Is the list of relays that I'm told to publish my attestation to, is it signed by the same Noster key? Is the hash signed by the same Noster key? And what is this NPUB to begin with? We give you a big fat button that you can click. It'll open up the profile

in your Noster client of choice, Amethyst, Domus, whatever, so you could verify

that the payment you're making is indeed

going to the person you think it is. So that's part 1.

Then once the payment is actually sent out the door,

you will create a pair of ephemeral keys and broadcast a noshter event with the attestation

so that when the Zeus Pay user comes to sign in later,

they can see that, yes, this is the this is the invoice that the payer got served. Yes. This is the amount associated with it. Yes. The LSP is not lying to me about the fee that it's taking. Everything adds up. And within the Zeus pay receive view, you can tap that nice little nostril icon

and see if an attestation has been broadcast.

And if all is good, if they've been using Zeus or another Zap Pay or Zap locker,

compatible wallet, it's gonna come up in green, and you're gonna be able to tap it again and see all the details of it, which is phenomenal.

Now the only caveat now, Matt, is that

no other wallets are supporting the scheme. Yeah. I was gonna say it's only if it's Zeus to Zeus. Right? Exactly. So right now, the default

settings will say, hey. If you're automatically redeeming your payments in your lightning address settings,

also accept

payments that don't have any attestation because that is the norm right now, unfortunately.

But we're hoping that this really lights a fire under people's asses. We think that this is gonna become sort of a de facto way to receive payments asynchronously,

and we expect support from many more wallets to come. So from a so you're using Nasr essentially

to broadcast,

like, proof of rug. Right? It's, like,

if you do funny business, there's an audit trail, and it's using Nostr to to broadcast those proofs.

Yeah. And, it's just phenomenal. I I think this is gonna,

like, awaken people to the fact that, yes, Nostrad can provide a great social media experience,

but it can also provide incredible ways for Bitcoin wallets to communicate with each other

and keep the services that

help string everything together

in check. So I'm really excited about this. Walk me through this because,

is there is is there a privacy

concern

in terms of

noster events with my payment information going out,

should users be using a

like, the app will just generate a new public key, private key for you? Every time you send a payment out. Yeah.

Oh, every time a pay the private On the sender side on the sender side, you can't the only way that the sender is gonna be docs is if you're using Zaps that are public. Right? And Zaps, you already have the functionality to say, oh, make this private, make this anonymous. Right? So these are the advertisements. Are they doxing things?

The only thing they're doxing, Matt, is that a payment got paid. And if you decode,

right, all of the only data that's in there

is a hash so that the client can easily look it up. Right? So they can match it. But the client needs that information locally to verify a hash because you can't

reverse the hash. So they'll get it from the server. They'll say the server will say, hey. You've got this payment available.

This is the amount you got. This is the fee,

and here this is the hash that got paid. You can double check it. So the sender is only broadcasting an event with the hash

and the bolt 11, and the bolt 11 can be decoded. And what's in there, Matt? It doesn't have any private information about who's actually receiving it. It's your pub key. It's the LSP's pub key. It's the LSP's pub key. So it has the LSP's pub key, when it got generated,

and the amount.

How are you gonna link it to someone unless they're, you know, opting in to broadcast these Zap events?

But I guess you would know you could

you could at least get activity from it. Right? It's like,

Odell is

receiving a bunch of payments, like, the frequency of payments. Right?

Only if you choose to broadcast those apps. And perhaps we'll actually it might not be a bad idea for people to opt out of the broadcasting of these app events in the service, and we'll consider to do that. But all the privacy leakage just happens from the actual Zap events themselves.

Got it. Nope. No privacy leaking is happening from the actual

attestation events, which is really awesome.

And, like, I know I'm being a little bit,

I'm just going through theoretical here because, obviously, like, my

and I just said it publicly on air. Like, my lightning address is Odell at Zeus Pay. So, like,

like, I'm obviously it's not

it's not, you know, a a discreet it's not a discreet lightning address.

But, like, is there so is there no negative

for me to use

a known public key? Like, if I if, let's say, it wasn't Odell at Zeus Pay. Imagine if my if my lightning address

was Evan at Zeus Pay,

and then I

end sec, right, which proves it's me, not Evan.

Like, that's I'm good.

User's good in that situation. That doesn't link it

to my nostril account.

Do you understand what I'm saying? So if you use a randomly generated

NSAC, like, the default? No. No. No. No. No. I'm saying if I used a if I used a lightning address that wasn't clearly me, like, not Odell at Zeus Pay. It was just, you know,

you know, beer con beer consumer@zeuspay.com.

But then I took my docs

and sec and put attached it to the account.

Yeah. Yeah. Then people looking you up would say, hey. This Zeus Pay account is a tied They would know that. Right? Yes. Right. So if you wanna be anon, I would say, hey. Let the app generate your own private keys. And, yes, and use that key to create the profile on nostril with that identity if there's a choice you wanna make. Okay. Awesome. Well, dude, I think this is, like, an absolute game changer. I think anyone who's listening to this that's using Nostra right now with WALDO, Satoshi,

considers switching

to to Zeus' easy mode so that you can have a

relatively self sovereign lightning address because while the satoshi will rug one day or will shock in k y c,

that will probably happen before mempool's clear,

just to be

just to be clear here. Well, if all goes well,

well, rugging will not be good. But yeah. When it happens when it happens, everyone's gonna act very surprised,

and now people have a

relatively convenient, easy to use option instead,

so consider it. But now let's go into

there's been some controversy

about your implementation.

I saw,

someone in the comments mentioned Matt Murallo's,

commentary against you. His name is actually Matt Corallo, but Matt Murillo has got a nice ring to it.

Why do you hate lightning so much?

And,

how do you feel about

attacking the lightning network in the way your implementation is done? So I think it's just really ironic

given that the last time I was on Citadel dispatch, I was

arguing against

Barak's approach to

attacking all the l and d nodes.

And well, well, well, look who's doing an even bigger attack on the Lightning Network. Who would have expected it, Matt?

So, yeah. Evan. Barack's attack was way more significant than your attack.

I don't know. Is it was Barak's attack an existential

level threat to the Lightning Network?

I mean, you literally shut down all the LND nodes.

Yeah. But I am gonna shut down the entire Lightning Network, so

checkmate.

So jokes aside, the concern

revolves around this idea of these 24 hour expiring payments. Right? And the idea, the concern is that I saw we have Tony in the comments,

of mutiny wallet.

Yeah. Sorry, Tony. We've been really making Tony and Ben and all the Uni Wallet crew, Paul.

We've been making your lives hell

with, some of these payments, and and we apologize for that. It makes sense because, like,

at the end of the day, lightning on mobile

revolves there's, like it's a little bit hacky. A lot of trade offs different trade offs are made and stuff. So, specifically, when you have a,

you know, one

mobile full node wallet,

embedded node wallet paying to another mobile embedded node wallet. Like, you're gonna have some some growing pains in there trying to figure out how how that works, and and there's a lot of payment failures. But, anyway,

Tony had a comment on Noster

about about scale he, like, walked through, like, the scaling numbers. Right? And that the idea, I guess, the main point of this concern is if you have a 24 hour payment if I send a 1,000,000 sats

to a Zeus pay user,

and it goes through

3 nodes

to get to that user,

a million sats is locked up for 24 hours,

well, until the payment is received at a max of 24 hours until the while until the Zeus user

1000000 Sats that can't be transferred on a Lightning Network because it's locked up liquidity. That that's the core of the concern. Right? And at scale, that becomes

a massive issue where you have a

a bunch of a bunch of liquidity is trapped rather than being used for multiple payments.

Am I correct?

Yeah. That's definitely a concern.

But, you know, we believe strongly at Zeus

in markets.

We think that pricing can adjust appropriately,

and,

we think we're gonna see a lot of adjustment

on the Lightning Network

if we see the service become popular.

And we understand that right now, we can be making jobs harder

for routing operators,

for operators of services, for people putting out these self custodial

wallets.

But,

we think that a lot of these things can be mitigated.

We think that signaling of prices

is gonna increase,

and

we honestly,

you know, are just really just trying, 1st and foremost, to push forward a better payment experience

using the tools that are available for us.

So we're willing to work with everyone

to make this a cleaner experience

from

those

node routers, those wallets,

lightning implementations

even,

and, we think this is ultimately gonna get us all into a better place.

That's very diplomatic of you, Evan.

You know, it's really difficult because over the last 24 hours,

people have said Zeus Pay is an attack on the Lightning Network.

People that I very much respect

in our industry and in our community have called me both

malicious

and stupid.

It doesn't it doesn't Have you been called this spook yet?

Well, not yet, but I'm sure it'll come up.

You know, I'm I'm not the spookiest guy in the space, but, you know, you could certainly throw accusations at me. And you know what? The

the scrutiny, the the hate is really gonna be amplified as Zeus continues to

get success.

And, you know, that's just to be expected. I mean, not everyone out there is a Matt Odell fan. Not everyone out there like Citadel dispatch or Big one part. I've been called all those things.

Yeah. So,

you know,

all I could say is that the hate that we've gotten

just really accentuates

the love that we've gotten. And I'm really appreciative of all the kind words and the support that we've gotten in public and behind closed doors. And I just wanna let everyone know that, you know, you can't push us away. We're here to stay.

Fuck you. I mean, look, the the whole beauty of Bitcoin is that it's a permissionless system.

Yeah. Absolutely. Right? Like, on the base layer,

if you make a payment and you pay the fees, the payment is valid. Right? And the incentives are all aligned.

Even if you're posting stupid monkey pictures, as long as the miners are getting paid out,

you're using Bitcoin in a fine manner. Right?

So we're trying to build with lightning

the payment rails of the future.

Right?

This is something that we want every citizen of the world, right, to be making their daily payments on.

If for that to be the case for the network to function, it has to run on good intentions and

being a good,

what's the word, a good steward of the network, then lightning is doomed to fail.

Right? Like, let's look at the actual incentives. Let's get them aligned, and let's make this thing work.

Because me and Super, who are running these zaplocker services,

we have a lot of incentive to provide this. There's crazy demand from our users

to provide these services. They are thrilled by the concept of having these self custodial lightning addresses. They wanna be able to accept payments when they're not online. They want these human readable lightning addresses,

and people are showing that they're willing to pay extra for them. That's that's the disconnect. Right? I mean, the disconnect is, like, this idea that,

like, right now, there's a better alternative.

Like, right now, the result is people just using Wallace, Satoshi, and other custodial services. Like, that is that is what is happening

in practice

by real people,

because there's there's no easy option.

No.

And and

it it it to me, the comp the the complaints just showed a complete lack of perspective.

Like, to what Absolutely. I've been shouting

shouting.

I I I do not

I do not send private messages in all caps, freaks. I will maybe I will start in a couple months

depending on

but, like, I've been talking to Evan and the guys at Mutiny,

forever now, where I'm like, I don't care how the fuck you do it.

We we need receive lightning address support. And I understand there's a bunch of different trade offs. I understand,

you know, l n URL has its benefits and its weaknesses, and lightning has its benefits and its weaknesses. But at the end of the day, I don't care how you get there.

Get us rug resistant

lightning addresses on mobile.

And you fucking did it. And you did it first,

and it's actually useful.

It's it's actually useful product that people will use and will demand,

when they when they realize. And it's it's very important that we have it there

available before Wallet of Satoshi rugs,

because scrambling to do it after the fact

would just be a way worse situation for users. More users will get hurt, and it'll just be a way worse situation altogether. Absolutely. Listen. We're not gonna save everyone, but we're creating the exit doors. So whether it be

Zap locker, whether it be Noster,

the exit doors are there, and these solutions are getting better and better every day.

We know that some things are breaking. Some services have not accounted for things like this to come up, but I am confident we will come up with solutions

that'll end up being better.

And if it's too much for a lightning node operator to adjust their fees or open up more channels like, honestly, like, if if you're getting your channels clogged up because of payments,

you could adjust your fees. Like, if you're having all these pending payments go through,

business is good.

Right. You find your equilibrium. Right? If all the slots

on HTLC slots on a channel get filled up, open up another channel. And listen, if you can't accommodate that demand, someone else will.

Right? Same thing with these wallets. If you're not building solutions that accommodate these new solutions that we're building,

we're gonna come to replace you. People are gonna stop using your shitty little wallet, and they're gonna come use Zeus and then mutiny, perhaps.

Right?

If your Lightning implementation

doesn't properly handle Dust HTLCs,

people are gonna stop using your Lightning implementation,

users and wallet developers.

Everyone down the stack,

we need to make

more resilient

protocols,

and we need to push things forward.

Because when this new bull market hits and is in full swing,

we can't be running on altruism.

We can't be sitting in circles

banging on drums in our little drum circle and being like, oh, yeah. The Lightning Network is Dandy. No. We're talking about commerce for the entire world.

Let's get there. And if we have to break a few things to do it

Fuck. Yeah. Then let's fucking do it.

Amen to that.

Damn.

No. Yeah.

And I you I

I'm correct in assuming that, like, if there was a better way to implement it,

you you're gonna iterate on top of it, and you will you'll change over time. Like, if if Of course. If the Lightning protocol allows you to do something like async payments or something like that

Yeah. A 100%.

Users over to that. A 100%.

Right? Like, you're not fixed. Everything is upgradable.

We could just

everyone could keep their same lightning address. The new scheme just works.

Let's do it. And I am willing

and able to work with anyone.

I got together with Supertestnet.

We bounced ideas off each other. We worked very closely together for about 3 weeks, and I was able to get this out the door. I'm willing to do the same with everyone else. If you have a better implementation

that you can help us with, I am just one man. I am just one wallet. I am just one LSP.

If this is gonna work at scale across multiple wallets, you need collaboration,

and I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to extend my hat out to Mutiny,

Breeze, Phoenix,

to other LSPs,

Voltage, c equals.

I am willing to work with everyone.

Just don't be an asshole

when I'm trying to move things forward with the tools that are available for us.

That's it. That's all I asked. Just be a decent person. I'm I'm not trying to be malicious. I'm just trying to make things better for everyone.

I'm sorry that things are breaking, but maybe they could have been designed better. Maybe we need changes to the Lightning Protocol. And, honestly,

we do need changes. And every week, we find new exploits and things that need to get patched.

And I know we need at Zeus, we need to do a better job at

interacting at the protocol level.

1st and foremost, we really want to put forward a blip so that

it's abundantly clear that an invoice, a bulk 11 invoice on Lightning, is a Huddl invoice

so that Wallace can more appropriately know how to handle it, which has been a big challenge for us. We first really hit that when we had a lot of users paying to, Robo SaaS, and they didn't get the right

interface on their Zeus

wallet. And because Robo SaaS uses Huddl invoices. Exactly. There are a lot of services that use Huddl invoices,

and we know that

we're making things a little bit difficult for them.

But

anytime any system grows, there's gonna be a little bit of pain. There's gonna be those growing pains,

and we wish they were avoidable completely.

Some people argue, oh, yeah. You could've avoided it. You could've just limited the system just to Zeus users.

Well, you know,

that's that's not gonna that's not gonna scale. That's not gonna get adoption. That's not gonna push the needle forward.

So I'm sorry. Some priorities are gonna have to change a little bit,

but this is not just the result of my science experiment.

I'm not just doing this for fun. Like, oh, let's see how many nodes I can mess up. There is real demand on the Lightning Network for it. People are paying me and Stupor for this service, and they fucking love it.

So let's bridge the gap, and

I don't know what it's gonna take. Maybe we have to charge extra

for CLTV

length on the actual protocol layer beyond just setting your rates on a node monolithically,

but we're willing to help push that forward. Yeah. It'd be cool if I could set higher fees for a higher CLTV.

Yeah. And and this idea has been proposed before. CLTV, by the way, is the

is is that amount of time till expiry?

Yes. Yes. In blocks.

And, basically, this idea has been come up before.

I tip my hat to to Lisa.

She had come up with the idea a few years ago,

and, unfortunately, it didn't get implemented. It's to no fault of her own. There's a lot of different priorities and

just so so few developers working on this. Kind of pressure when you have market pressure

tends to result in in these things getting improved and the system getting more robust. Like, this is how permissionless systems

innovate or or or get stronger over time. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of a sink or swim sort of thing. And,

you know, honestly, we we hope that it doesn't get to the point where it destroys the Lightning Network. I mean, I think that's a I think that's a bit hyperbolic. I don't think it's gonna get to that point. But, honestly, if this is what kills lightning, then lightning never deserved to live in the 1st place. Fuck. Yeah. And if it kills lightning,

then fuck it. Zeus is not gonna be a lightning wallet anymore. We're gonna continue to build on Bitcoin using other layers and using other l two technologies

to provide the best payment solution that we can while still putting forward our values,

self custody and privacy.

So,

I just wanted to do a quick shout out to

absolute ride or die freak,

Finch.

Oh, I love Finch. Finch is a fantastic individual.

This is the first time he's joined our Noster live chat, and he sent a zap of a 100 k SATs. I appreciate it.

I guess it's a down payment because I do have a bet with him that

by the end of the year,

he has to take me for a round of golf. And if they do clear, I have to take him for a round of a golf. That that that's a win win bet right there.

Cheers, Finch. Appreciate you. We do what is his he has false wear. What is do you know what the domain is?

I don't know his domain offhand. It's just put it in the comments. I'm curious. I I should be able to show it better, but

I have multiple of his items.

He makes good quality,

swag.

Cashew I'm reading the comments right now. Cashew is the ultimate technology.

For what? For rugging people?

Hey.

I like,

I like I like Federated Xiaomi and eCash.

I think it's interesting. And I think even even just regular

Chow Me and eCash for something like Wallet and Satoshi would just be a massive net improvement

because they can rug you already. They might as well you might as well have some privacy from the custodian.

Yeah. That's true. I mean, listen. I I think it's not Oh, falseware is dead. So forget the shill. If you have falseware gear,

you have limited edition. You won.

Yeah. Sorry. Continue.

Sorry. Cashew. Yeah. Sorry. I I incessantly dunked on Cashew. Yeah. Why did you that was the first comment you read, and you're just, like, I'm just gonna shit on Cashew. We were talking about something

else. I mean, listen. Every technology has trade offs. Right? Nothing is ultimate.

Zeus Pay is an ultimate.

But,

I could definitely appreciate the privacy property as VCASH.

And, I think it was Ben Arc posting on Twitter today,

saying how fascinating it would be if these CBDCs

were built using this eCash technology Never will happen. Will never ever happen.

They're not gonna there's not gonna be a CBDC

that gives you privacy from the government.

They're gonna virtue signal about how it provides privacy, whatever they offer

and Elon's version is going to do the same exact thing,

but that just means

traditional bank privacy, which is,

you know, when you pay someone, they won't know your full financial transaction history,

but the company that's the companies that are involved will know. All those third parties will know, and they will share share that information. They'll sell it to advertisers. They'll share with governments.

There's zero shot in hell.

This is, like, safe's argument that, like, the biggest threat to Bitcoin is that, like, governments go back to a gold standard and have responsible monetary policy.

Like, it's just a fucking

mental circle jerk. Like, that will never fucking happen. Yeah. Right.

Well, I don't know. I mean, I feel like Bitcoin has been a driver of rates being increased. Right? Like, we're already sort of rewriting the code for these central banks.

The real the real irony would be if Justin Sun doesn't get thrown in jail

and CBDCs

are a Tron asset

on the Tron blockchain. Oh. That would be

probably

one of the more infuriating timelines. But Well, let's likely. You can't we can't call the top on clown world ever, Matt. And Yeah. That will we can expect

the worst. We we should only expect the worst from these government propped up solutions,

and all we can do is try to create the best user experiences to help counteract them.

I think we're things are gonna ramp up in the next few years. And if we don't make an incredible payment experience using Bitcoin,

then we're doomed. You, me, our children, our grandchildren, we're all gonna be doomed, and the severity of this is completely understated.

So we need to start getting serious about building out Freedom Technology

in a resilient way and build these great payment experiences at the same time.

So,

you know, let's let's stop yelling at each other on on Twitter. Let's stop the Twitter fingers, and let's start working on solutions

and stop attacking people who are trying to

make the world a better place

and make the world more free for, you know, our our descendants.

Yeah. I mean, just stop using Twitter, but

I agree with everything else. I, so you mentioned fees.

You mentioned people are willing to pay for it. I saw someone in the chat.

Someone in the chat said

that the fees were quite high

on on

on

easy mode on on Zeus easy mode using,

using your lightning addresses.

You wanna break down, like, what what people can expect from a fee perspective? I think people have been coddled

Yeah. While that's the Satoshi fee model just because it's custodial.

Yeah. So let's let's kick it from the top.

For

Olympus by Zeus, Olympus by Zeus is our LSP. The fee model is as such.

You need to send a minimum payment of 50,000 sats, which we're trying to bring down,

but you get a

channel first payment. For the first payment, once you have a channel, you can exhaust that channel. Sent, like, a 100,000 sets,

and it charged me 10,000 sats to open that first channel. And you'll and in that case, you'll get additional

100,000

sats on the inbound side. Yeah. You can gain them purely balanced. I have I have both. I think it's way to go. So

it's a 10,000 SAT fee for channels up to 1,000,000 sats. So to get the most bang for your buck, you might want to send a full million. Right? High rate because you have to pay an on chain transaction fee. So

Exactly. And then beyond that, we charge 1% for the channel up to 5,000,000 sats.

Once you have that channel, though,

well, you have 0 fee routing. We're gonna charge you 0 SATs as the base fee and as the PPM

when you're making a payment in or out of that channel from us. Shout out to, one of our community supporters,

0 fee routing. He ran a great node with 0 fees, and we're continuing that ideology with our paid channels.

Is that low pack, or is that, like, are you gonna No. That's gonna be sustainable. We're gonna do that. We wanna provide the best payments experience for our users and also make revenue off of the channel open, you're taking a profit off the channel open. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But you're not taking

receiving

4.9,

and you get an extra 100,000, so 5,000,000 sat channels. That's our max right now. And, hopefully, we could extend that out. We're hoping to launch more

services so that you can get a la carte channels

from us in the future, public ones too,

that are announced.

But, you know, right now, we're sticking with our core services.

And, hopefully, we can add 0Conf channel support for remote LND nodes as well and remote core lightning nodes as well,

but that's not quite ready yet. Wait. Wait. So just I'm I'm confused.

So the node the LSP

routing node,

your your Zeus super node managed by God's,

that is not charging me a fee, but I'm still getting charged 1%

on every transaction?

No.

For your standard transactions that you're receiving synchronously,

Those are all free. 1% channel

open if it's over,

a million? 1,000,000. Yes. Correct.

So, like, the best if you want, like, the best

fee bang for your buck, you should your first payment into

Zeus easy mode should be

999,999¢.

Yep.

You get the best deal.

Yep.

Just make it a clean mail. Or, like, if you go all the way up to 5

oh, no. If you go up to 5 Well, it's it's the same it's the same rate based on percentage at that point. Right. So whatever you need, just 1,000,000 will be the best bang for your buck. The more you send it first, lower your fees.

The first payment. Yes. Correct. After that, you're free to send and receive.

The only fees that you're gonna incur

otherwise is going to be, any other hops past Olympus that you need to get to, but we intend to make the Olympus node one of the best lightning nodes on the network.

We are in roughly the top 150 on the lightning terminal list. We are number 14, I believe, on the LN router list. We're gonna just try to keep

crushing it on all the metrics. It's been a real learning experience trying to be a good node operator,

and, we're gonna continue to get better and better and make it even easier and cheaper to get to wherever you wanna go on the Lightning Network. Okay. So walk me through this. I have my first payment was to to my easy mode Zeus was a 100,000 sats. You took 10,000 sats out of that, opened a channel for me.

I have 90,000 sets in my wallet, I have a 100,000 sets inbound.

If I

receive more than a 100,000 sats,

I haven't done this yet, what happens? It does a second channel get opened? Is splicing involved?

Okay. So a second channel will be opened if we cannot find a route to you,

and we do not support splicing yet.

We're dependent on l and d for a back end to add support for splicing, but it sounds like we're gonna get it probably in the next year

as Taproot Assets are gonna be using a form of it.

And, don't get me wrong. We're huge bulls on splicing.

Tip my hat to my boy, Dusty, who's done a fantastic job pushing that forward. You have that in Phoenix now,

and that is no small feat. So, yeah, we are huge supporters of splicing, and we want it in Zeus ASAP.

Phoenix is, like, a special case because they're vertically integrated.

Their lightning implementation

from a sync is is is is essentially, like, just is designed to be the ultimate mobile back end for Phoenix Wallet. Right? Yeah. Yeah. They have a lot of prioritize splicing because it's important for these mobile users and and I mean, it's not really just important for the mobile users. I think they're gonna incur some privacy benefits from it over time depending on how the implementations work with different pools, with perhaps mixing. That's gonna be fantastic. But right now, the main benefits of resplacing,

really are are for the LSP. So we have an incentive to get into our systems,

more than ever.

Beyond that, for the users, it's more so like dealing with force closes and stuff like that. Splicing makes things a little bit easier,

but there are trade offs. You know?

I'm not laughing at you. Matata on the comments said, the freedom is in the node in the phone.

I'd wear that shirt. Who wants to print those? In all caps.

How about how about one of those, what's that movie Zoolander where the files are in the computer? Yeah. Just be like, the node is in the phone.

Yeah. I know. Shirts.

Okay. This is all awesome.

You meant you mentioned Tapas.

So is your vision,

is your vision that, like do you think, like, users will be receiving

CBDCs

over lightning

to Azus wallet?

I don't think that Lightning

is gonna really facilitate

all that

the central banks want. Right? Like,

if if the CBDC has just had the properties of a UTXO,

that's not really all the control that they want. Right? So you agree with me. They're just gonna use Tron. Right? They're not gonna use Yeah. Probably.

Probably.

But

at the others on the other side of things, it would not be as bad as other realities for sure.

There's definitely an intriguing prospect of being able to easily

not only receive dollars on Lightning,

but to also have that easy off ramp where I'm like, oh, here's my shitcoins. I could press one button, and I'm in Bitcoin. Like, that is a pretty appealing concept. Yeah. But you could just do that with Tron.

Sure. You can do that with, I don't

know, how many shit coins.

Yeah. But Tron Tron is number 1 Tether. That's why I Yeah. Yeah. That's that's absolutely true. It's because no one cares that Tron is centralized because Tether's centralized, and you're really trusting Tether. So it's just you wanna use the most centralized chain possible so you have the lowest fees possible.

And if for whatever reason Justin Sun decides to

reorg reorg Tron,

then Tether is just, like, nope. We moved to this other chain, and this is your balance, and you can redeem it with your Tron key, and you're good. It doesn't really fucking matter what they use. They just wanna use the cheapest, easiest integrate. Right?

Yeah.

At that point, these people don't really care about the underlying

tech. So we're gonna see. It's gonna be a tough battle for Tapas.

You know? Listen. We're definitely you pronounce it. You pronounce it like

a Latin American entree.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's some variations on the theme, tapas, you know, taproot assets. But I like Tapas just personally. Tapas.

But, yeah, who knows?

I definitely am sympathetic to the Tapas crew.

I am also sympathetic to the view that, yeah, maybe we shouldn't just be

holding water for all these fiat rails.

And,

I think there's an argument

there's an argument

that people want digital dollars in their wallet. Yeah. For sure. I just don't understand

except for an ideological reason, which I don't think is strong enough,

Why if you're gonna use Tether, you would, like, be, like, draw a line. And I never use Tether. But, like, just draw a line in the sand and be, like, I'm only gonna use it on lightning. I'm not

on. Like,

it's it's why why would I wanna deal with liquidity? Why would I wanna deal with all the different trade offs that we make on lightning so that we can settle on chain in a trust minimized manner,

when ultimately, I'm just trusting Bitfinex

and Palo and all the guys at Tether. Yeah. Yeah. Me anyway. Feels Feels like there's always gonna be that redemption issue. Like, I feel like you could just skip this whole process and just integrate Tether on Tron if what you want is Tether in your wallet, but it's like there's this weird ideological

thing where it's,

yeah, it just doesn't I I don't think there's product market fit. I think it can't compete with centralized chains. I just

do not understand the the Taproot assets thing. I just don't I don't think it makes any lightning's not

Taproot assets also has the aspect of on chain stuff. Mhmm. Which maybe makes a little bit more sense, but the fees would be ridiculous. So if it's a centralized asset, it makes no sense. And if the argument is stable coins, then it's gonna be a centralized asset.

So I because it's pointing to something that's in the real world, and you have to have a trusted third party watch over that.

So it just does it it doesn't line up to me,

and I feel like

not many people talk about it.

It's gonna be fascinating. It's gonna be fascinating, and

we'll we'll see how it plays out.

We got a comment in the side.

Someone's asking, can I use Zeus with Core Lightning? Yes. You can.

We currently support Can you use it with an async node?

Yes. You can use it with,

any clear node, but but that functionality is being deprecated.

We've had some good conversations with Bastian,

I believe last year at tab conf.

And he said that, basically,

it's not really built for people to use it at home. And, just the APIs just haven't been up to par with other

It's built to run Phoenix Wallet. Yeah. It's built to run Phoenix. So, like, I I we I don't really wanna spend time maintaining that when there are other alternatives. But Core Lightning, we love. We wanna continue to support.

We support it with c lightning, rest right now, but we wanna dedicate some resources to get it working with the new embedded

CLN REST API as well as stuff like

commando and ln message. So if you wanna help us with that, we're somewhat close with it, but we need someone,

who's willing to spend a little time to get that over the line. We've been a little busy lately, if you haven't noticed. Yeah. Too busy attacking lightning.

So

so, I mean, we we mentioned Phoenix a lot. Phoenix is, you know, in terms of not running a remote node and having a,

freedom oriented experience

enlightening on your phone, Phoenix has been the leader.

I would say Phoenix and Breeze has been the have been the leaders.

And now Zeus is entering this fray. Obviously, mutiny entered the fray about 3 months ago, 4 months ago.

I'm curious.

Have you, like, thought like, what is

how do you think about obviously, Phoenix all of Phoenix, Breeze, Mutiny, none of them support Lightning Address received,

which I think is that is obviously the killer app of this

embedded node easy mode to use launch.

But besides that, like, how do you think about the trade offs between

something like Phoenix and

Zeus easy mode?

There's definitely a few trade offs. Right? I think Phoenix right now is faster,

to start up.

They are using a

what is it? I believe it is a

anyway, they have just an API to get the block info. Right? So we at Zeus, we're using BIP

157

block filters with Neutrino. We have no idea about your on chain funds, and this takes a little bit longer to sync up. We need to get better. We need to have a

side load mode. So that's a trade off.

But on the other hand of it, Phoenix knows all about your on chain transaction data, which is

great. Right? Right.

Then the other trade off privacy

wise between Zeus and Phoenix is that you're using

Async

the Phoenix node to do your payment routing. So they know

Oh, it's not calculated locally when you send. Exactly. So they know every payment destination, every amount, when. They could link it to you.

So it just doesn't do that.

All the route calculation is done on your phone, so you have fantastic sender privacy on Lightning.

So, there's that.

But Phoenix is honestly, like, you could criticize them, but we see them as number 1 in the game right now.

They do a really good job. I love on their website.

They do a really good job of just explaining the trade offs in relatively good English, like, in in readable English. You know? It's not, like, techy stuff. Fantat yeah. That's fantastic. They're doing a better job at it than us, and, they keep things simple and just easy to use. And, you know, I really tip my hat to them. And I just hope that we can

provide them with some serious competition over the years and, you know, provide a better experience for end users at the end of the day.

Awesome.

Okay. While I have you,

Yeah. We gotta wrap up somewhat soon. I gotta get to New York. We have a lightning meetup at PubKey tonight, and, you know, it's gonna get spicy.

I'm sure everyone's gonna be like, Evan, why are you destroying lightning? What's going on with this other exploit? So what is their time constraint? What you have 10 minutes? Yeah. I got another 10. Let's do it. Okay.

Antoine Riard,

one of our

No. I I don't know what to

an an incredibly esteemed

developer in,

contributor in Bitcoin.

Particularly on the adversarial environment side. So,

like, pressure testing Bitcoin, pressure testing lightning, looking for attack vectors, whatnot.

Recently said that he's no longer gonna work on Lightning,

because there's concerns

over,

over a tax that could happen without a change to the Bitcoin protocol itself, without a change to the on on chain protocol,

the the the base layer.

How do you think about that? Like, what are your thoughts there? It doesn't have to, you know, high level. Like, what how are you how are you thinking about this? Like, is lightning fucked?

Is everyone gonna lose their money?

High level,

I would say that the attack is

pretty bad.

I don't think it's the end of the world, though. It can be mitigated.

Some changes to how we sign off on the HTLC seems like a solution to to nip in the bud.

Node operators that or businesses that don't need to route

avoid this attack entirely. So the homies at PubKey, they don't have to worry about it. They're not doing routing on their node. The idea is the attackers on both sides of the route. Right? So, like, the routing Yeah. You need you need 2 channels

to the node. Right? So this could be mitigated with,

you know, making good decisions about who you peer up with. That's not a good answer, by the way.

Putting constraints on it? No. Obviously not. Like I don't like the idea that, like,

I'd I'd what? We're just gonna KYC all of our channel partners?

Yeah. I don't think that That would be really difficult, especially if you're running the LSP. Right?

Yeah.

But no. I mean, there are some measures you could put in. You can say, hey.

Don't accept channels, 2 channels from anyone even though you could still do an attack with 2 different node pub keys. It really has to be changed at the, the protocol level for lightning

to really be mitigated.

But at least operators today have a couple of options about what they can do, keeping their eye on the mempool in multiple locations

and, modifying,

their fee settings and and simply choosing not to route. So at least businesses,

shouldn't be affected

if their main thing is accepting payments for services. Keeping payments.

Yeah. So any anyway, everyone's gonna stop being routing those anyway because the Zeus thing and the Zap locker thing is Everybody's gonna use Zeus instead?

Oh, no. No. No. The whole Lightning Network is gonna be dead anyway. Oh, this 0 because you're already Yeah. Yeah. We're zeroing out the Lightning Network.

But, yeah, I mean, otherwise, the only other thing I would say on this is, like, Antwan, man, I really appreciate your work. But, like, why are you gonna be so dramatic and and announce yourself quitting

alongside the announcement of the vulnerability? Like, I I don't think that was cool. You could you could tell that you could work out whatever you want, but, like, doing it in the announcement was a little,

I don't know, like, a bad way to go about it. But, technically, it was a separate email. Right? It was the next one after that.

Yeah. I guess. But, did it have to be done like that? I don't know. Didn't he disclose the vulnerability they his concerns were disclosed to, like,

the lightning Illuminati

Yeah. Yeah. Last year. Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's been out, so, you know, not everything about it. It just feels like he amped up the drama on it. And as a result, people think the sky is falling. But it's okay.

You know, it's it's gonna happen, and we're still very appreciative of of both his findings and his other work. So, you know, I don't want the And to be clear, he's not quitting that too personally. He's just quitting lightning. Yeah. Yeah. So perhaps he's gonna build the thing that, we all use after Zeus destroys the lightning network. So we're really excited about that. That's gonna be great. Antoine, help us out, bro. Okay. Well, I thank you for providing some insight there.

I just think in general, and I think it lines up well with our conversation is

is that the Lightning Network has, you know, kind of just grown up in,

like, the intensive care unit. Like, it hasn't been exposed to any external pathogens. Like, there's no it's been in a very sterile environment, not really an ever so environment.

And I think it's gonna take attacks. It's gonna take bugs. It's gonna take vulnerabilities. It's gonna take all this different shit for it to actually get robust if we wanted to handle,

you know, the

global financial transactions.

Right. Right. And it and it's and it's not like,

you know, all these things are being exposed, and everything's not being done maliciously.

Right? But, you know, we we gotta expose them. We gotta bring them to the light. We gotta test things out.

And I am confident,

that we have so many brilliant people working on this technology

that we can find solutions to mitigate basically everything.

Meanwhile, the low IQ version, left left side IQ version is I have a reckless amount of sats on the lighting network, and I'll let you freaks know if someone steals it, and I notice.

Well, sometimes I wonder if people are taking my money, and I'm not sure. But

well, I just threw my hat on the ring, Odell. I I think I finally passed you up on channel capacity and channel count. So, you're long enough.

Yeah. It took me a long time, but, you know, now it's time for Zeus to get serious.

And, you know, we're just really happy to have gotten this initial release out the door despite its ugly spots. We're gonna keep iterating,

keep shipping amazing payments technology,

and just try to push everything a little bit more forward. I love it, dude. I appreciate you. Before we wrap up, I'm gonna hit us with some

user supported comments in boostergrams from podcasting 2.0, then we're gonna go to final thoughts with Evan.

As always, dispatch is purely funded by our wonderful audience, the ride or die freaks out there with Bitcoin.

Obviously, now they can do it through the livestream, which is really fucking awesome.

So I appreciate all you freaks who've joined us live at sillodispatch.com/stream,

but you can find all relevant

links at sillodispatch.com.

We have a lot of supporters on podcasting 2.0.

Last episode at black coffee BTC,

169,420

sets. Here's my periodic v for v boomer boost. Mempools will always clear.

Black coffee,

interesting if

yeah. I mean, you're wrong, but I appreciate the support. We have at CumRocket 69,420.

Stay solvent. Stay humble. Stack stats.

A little bit redundant,

but great advice. We have at Eric

99 with 50,000 stats. Stay humble. Stack stats. Great advice. We have at poor Ben Gunn with 21,000 sets,

fist, and some kind of flag that I'm not recognizing.

Thank you, Freaks, for supporting the show. It's really fucking cool. That goes to my

self sovereign full node that I interact with using Zeus. Sometimes I will be around people that don't really understand the implications of Bitcoin, and I will open up my Zeus wallet. And I'll just scroll through the streaming stats and the and the podcast boosts

and the zaps.

Zaps go there too,

and it's really powerful. Like, they're, like, holy shit. Just like random fucking people sent this to you,

without a middleman. Like, that is insane. So thank you, Freaks.

Evan,

it's been a pleasure.

This has been awesome. I I am so fucking bullish

on easy mode on Zeus

and, Zeus pay. It is it it is I feel like the future is here already.

So thank you for building it, and thank you for pushing limits. Do you have any final thoughts for our audience?

Folks, it's not gonna be perfect

on day 1. There's still a lot of work to do. We need to be humble enough to accept that our solutions are gonna have flaws. Things are gonna,

you know, be pushed to their limits, but,

we're gonna get to where we wanna go. It's gonna take some more years,

but we're really happy to be a part of this community pushing our software forward.

And, you know, we're excited to keep doing this for years to come. So, Matt, thank you so much for having me on the show. It is my favorite show in the entire universe to be on, and, you know, we we gotta make it happen more often. And, just thank you, brother, for all the support that you've given me over the years. I am eternally grateful for you and the many others who are

helping me make this a reality.

And, you know, I just expect much more to come. This is just the start.

Much so, brother. The feeling's mutual.

Huge shout out to Evan. Huge shout out to the freaks who joined us and to all of you.

Evan, say hi to all the pub key freaks for me. Will do. Have a great time there. PK Lounge. You can tell them they're really mad at me,

right now. We're not showing up yet? Come on, bro. Yeah. I wasn't gonna say that part out loud, but, yes, I have not been to PubKey yet. You can tell them I'll be there in December and that they can hold me to it. Tell them I'll be there before mempool's clear.

Yeah. Well, that's for sure.

And,

yeah. I appreciate you. Stay on the StackSatStreaks.

Until next time. Peace.