[00:00:00] Tyler Evans: Hey,everyone. Tyler from Bitcoin Magazine. I'm here with, Alan from Blockstream,Diego from RSK, Muneeb from Blockstack, who just joined us and the AlexBosworth. Welcome everyone. We're here to talk about building on Bitcoin and ahappy having everyone that came earlier than we were all expecting, but now theblocks have slowed down considerably.

But thank you guys all for tuning in and sharing with us alittle bit about how you all are building on Bitcoin. So all, let's get startedjust with some intros and if each of you would kind of introduce the projectyou're working on and particularly how you all individually are building onBitcoin.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: Happyhalving back at you and all the crew here. If you all want, I can, I can start,a little bit with, an abstract or what, what do we have in doing. At RSK, we,we have been [00:01:00] extending Bitcoin with a second layer that enablessmart contracts or touring complete smart contracts, fully compatible with theethereum.

So you have all the smart contract capabilities andinterfaces of Ethereum, but secured by the Bitcoin network by merged mining.And also we are a sidechain, so our native currencies, Bitcoin, so the Bitcoinson RSK are backed 1:1 by Bitcoin on the Bitcoin blockchain. So that's a littlebit of an abstract of what we have been doing.

The network has been live since January 3rd, 2018. Happybirthday, Bitcoin. And that's, what we are doing related to, to extend it a bit.

Tyler Evans: Awesome.Alan, I'll all kick it over to you.

Allen Piscitello: Sure.Yeah. My name is Adam Piscitello. I'm the VP of product at Blockstream. So asmany of you know, we do quite a bit in the blockchain space, in the Bitcoinspace.

What kind of [00:02:00] things I wanted to talk about todayis how we're extending Bitcoin through a couple of different solutions. So wework on c-lightning. So that was one of the, if not the first, one of the firstlightning implementations so that's one way to extend Bitcoin into morefrequent type retail type payments.

We also work on liquid network, which is focused more ontrading and assets. So this is a side chain of Bitcoin that allows you tocreate assets and has a different trade offs then you would have on Bitcoin. Soyou can't always do everything on the native Bitcoin first layer withoutsacrificing something.

So that's why a lot of these solutions are useful. And oneof the other things we also work on too, is something called simplicity, whichis a smart contract language that is designed to be verifiable. It's so small,you can fit it on a tee shirt, so that the native, you can really understandwhat the, Smart contracts going to do. So it's designed to be very, verifiableso that you get it correct. So [00:03:00] if you know of complicated financial,constructs, you want to make sure you get it right. So that's something that wehave, we're going to be extending liquid with that and we think that that wouldalso be something that could be very useful once it's proven to move to theBitcoin blockchain as well.

Tyler Evans: Muneeb, would you introduce yourself a littlebit about Blockstack?

Muneeb Ali: Muneebhere cofounder of Blockstack. I think you should think of us as, enabling web3apps that anchor to Bitcoin, right? So we, again, as others have mentioned thatBitcoin  has a limited scripting languageand is very kind of like stable and durable and doesn't change, which is, whichis a feature, right?

But at the same time, you do want to extend thefunctionality in certain ways. And, the way we do it is the concept is a littlebit different from a side chain. Like maybe "sister chain" is a goodway to think about it, where, we anchor the blocks in our blockchain, with onBitcoin security, right?

So if there are smart [00:04:00] contracts or Web2.0  applications that are registering assets likeusernames or domain names, they get anchored back into Bitcoin security.  similar to, some of the other, interests thatyou saw, we do have a new smart contract language, that is, basically, again,focusing on precision and making these programs verifiable.

Instead of, kind of like how developers ended up kind oflike hurting themselves. So the network has been live since late 2018 and lastyear we got, something like, you know, we went from some, like 20 applicationsto more than 400 applications built on that book. Right? And examples wouldinclude, people are trying to build like simple, web publishing tools.

If you just want to publish a website,  like a decent lives website anchored. Throughour blockchain to  Bitcoin, and adecentralized blogging, or a decent sized photo sharing. Just privacyapplications. Like if you just want to do your taxes privately. So, think ofthese apps as like, they are [00:05:00] more like, they're user owned, right?So most of the logic is with the user, and then any coordination or discovery,it happens through, through the blockchain. They're great.

Tyler Evans: And,Alex, I'll kick it over to you.

Alex Bosworth: Hi,I'm Alex Bosworth and I'm the lightning infrastructure lead at Lightning Labs.and the main thing we're working on at Lighting Labs is the lightning network.

And, we have, an engine for that, LND, which, drives, youknow, user wallets or server routing nodes. so it has a lot of differentpurposes. And I work more on the infrastructure side of things. And, I work alot on this project called lightning loop. And lighting loop is a way for youto, translate funds from the lightning network to the blockchain or from theblockchain to the lightning network using non-custodial swaps. and that's a service that we're building out withthe idea that, you know, we want to make Bitcoin, more private,  we want to make it, faster and we want tomake it cheaper to use.

So lightning lupus, a project that can kind of expose[00:06:00] the benefits of lightning to people who are using the blockchain andalso in reverse. And then I also work on lots of other projects. so I startedthis site, yalls.org. I've made all sorts of tools for lightning. so, you know,I'm very focused on just making lightning a success and getting a lot of fundsto move over that network.

Tyler Evans: Awesome.And we had a fun panel earlier today, talking about lightning specifically andall the development that's going on in that area. But I want to open up alittle bit more broadly and just kind of start with an abstract question interms of  Bitcoin as a technology, as aprotocol really as a stack, develop, tremendously over the last four yearssince the last halving, where we have now all these different layer twosolutions, whether those are side chains or lightning or, you know, differenttypes of payment channels being developed, and now put into production and usedby thousands of people around the world.

[00:07:00] Where do you guys see the Bitcoin technologystack growing to over the next four years, if we're looking back at the nexthalving?

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: I can share kind of the vision I've beensharing since 2015 when we started with RSK. I think Bitcoin is evolving tobecome the foundations of a new internet for the transfer of value, what I callthe internet of value, and others are calling the same, which is a network ofnetworks.  For the transfer of value thatshare certain values, openness, interoperability, peer to peer functioning. AndI think all the things that we are doing in, you know, in this panel all theteams that are working on this panel are working to try to extend  the core Bitcoin capabilities of being thesafest store of value into a full blown financial system and peer to peerinternet.

I think it's like weare using bitcoin as the foundations to build these peer to peer [00:08:00]internet  and fully financial system now.So, so I see that happening, not even for the next four years. I think thatwill happen earlier than we think. A lot of the things that are alreadyhappening, and I think by the end of the year and very likely next year, we'llsee these become a reality, a tangible reality for everybody.

Muneeb Ali: Yeah,I can, I can add some to this. So I think a very interesting thing over hereis, if you look at the last couple of years, you'd notice this trend that a lotof funding or even a lot of developer activity for use cases that are more inthe smart contracts or Web3.0 development. We're going outside of the Bitcoinecosystem.

For some reason people were thinking of Bitcoin as like,"Hey, Bitcoin is slow" or "Bitcoin doesn't scale". Andhere's another kind of like, you know, layer one solution. And the interestingthing is that  it's almost like thedesign decisions of Bitcoin are [00:09:00] actually very mature and they'rethere for very good reasons. It's just that, it takes a while to understand whythings were done the way they were done.

Right. And it, and at the same time as good to explore otherother types of systems that are more experimental, and do that. Interestingly,what I think, what might happen, like, which might be different in the nextfour years compared to the last four years, is that people are coming back toBitcoin and they're like, aha. Like what they were doing was actually good andwas there for really good reasons. And you can actually, innovate in theBitcoin ecosystem more.

And in, in some ways, like, think of even the work thatBlockstream is doing or lightning is doing, right. These are really hardchallenges. You can't expect, you know, these systems to be fully in productionused by millions of users in like a six months or a year timeframe, right?

So people's expectations, like it's a little bit like,there's more marketing and hype happening outside of the Bitcoin ecosystem,whereas [00:10:00] like there's a lot of like real value being created bypeople just being like heads down and actually doing the hard work. And I thinkin the end, a network effects is what I think people would watch out for.

if you're building, if you, if you look at it, a lot ofblockchain systems, they're really trying to define ownership, right? And ifyou're defining ownership on a blockchain, which blockchain do you think isgoing to be around 10 years from now? Like, like Bitcoin will be there. Wedon't know if other blockchains will be there or won't be there.

Right? So if the core value prop is ownership , andanchoring kind of like this, information that is not going to change, thenetwork effects start happening around Bitcoin. Right. And the scalability andall of these other things that people think of as limitations, can get solvedaround the Bitcoin core chain.

Right.  that's where,you know, once the network effects start, just like the internet, like, imaginewhen the internet was starting, people are trying to, if people were trying tocreate other smaller networks. When one network starts taking [00:11:00] off,the network effects mean that everybody kind of like moves over to the biggestnetwork instead of being on a disconnected small chain.

Allen Piscitello: Ithink that was a pretty big, very accurate assessment there. A lot of thingsbeing built on the Bitcoin space are, you know, really is a tortoise and theHare. We saw a lot of marketing focued launches of things that that will workfor demo quality. But once they get beyond that demo quality, you start seeingwhere it just drops off and it just, they run into dead ends and they're backto where Bitcoin was, where they're having to create a new, you know, 2.0version of it.

so this is something that, you know, I think everyoneinvolved in the Bitcoin ecosystem has been doing is building these necessarycomponents in our infrastructure that's needed.

It is a very long game. you know, building out lightning.There is a lot to do still, to make this something that can onboard a billionpeople. But it's a path that actually is feasible for it. Something likeliquid, we think that [00:12:00] Bitcoin will become the preferred assetsettlement class of assets around the world as more and more currencies startfalling apart, people aren't going to want to accept payments in anything otherthan Bitcoin.

And this is where you want to have something where you canhave assets, settlement, between international trade. Bitcoin will enable this,and it's going to be something that has, you know, we need to get theinfrastructure in place because it could start happening faster than weexpected. Especially with, you know, what's happened over the last year.

We're starting to see just the complete monetary system  what will lead to collapse.  It's something that, where we really do needto get it together and build that infrastructure out so that we can onboardpeople that not necessarily aren't the Bitcoin fanatics, but the people whowill need Bitcoin , to survive. And they'll do it because they have to.

Alex Bosworth: Ohyeah. I think we're all like riding this wave of Bitcoin.  People are like, oh, we need lightning orsomething to make Bitcoin survive. But I think it's like totally thereverse.  Bitcoin [00:13:00] becomingmoney is kind of like opening up all these use cases. Even altcoins, I think,are kind of like a use case on Bitcoin because now you can sell this whateveryou want to anybody in the world, there's nobody stopping you  because you can trade that for money.

Lightning, I think is going to really help allow more usecases because of this micropayments concept. like if you think about it, everyregular Bitcoin node, when you launch it, you're not doing anything that's so unique.  there's been peer to peer networks beforeyou're talking to your peers. You're exchanging information. But with thelightning node, something that is really special there is that you're not justexchanging information with your peers, you're actually transacting with them.And so every node that launches has a lightning node is actually like a littlebusiness.  All these thousands ofthousands of nodes that people are deploying, they're deploying little serviceproviders that use a monetized protocol and, you know, they're making money,they're spending money. So I think as Bitcoin becomes more like real money, youknow, more usable and more ubiquitous then it will be built into more protocolsthat use had money aspect to deliver new capabilities that we never [00:14:00]had

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: before.

Tyler Evans: Andit's so cool that anyone can be their own payment network or routing note or,you know, operate their own Visa network. You just have to install some opensource software and, and your connected and routing payments to a globalaudience.

Muneeb, you mentioned kind of the, comparing, you know,Bitcoin to what's happening in the Web3.0 stack that you've seen develop withEthereum and with other protocols.

When you guys look at kind of the Bitcoin infrastructurestack, you know, we've got, obviously huge progress on micro payments withlightning, and we've got a number of different smart contracts options outthere with RSK, with, simplicity and liquid, with Blockstack .

Where are the holes that you guys see that are the missingpieces of the Bitcoin infrastructure stack? Where do people need to be spendingtheir time to get up to that kind of feature parody?

Muneeb Ali: I think it's a great question and I think,the, let me translate that [00:15:00] question into skillsets and people.Right? I actually think that, sophisticated engineers, like people who can lookunder the hood and actually like really understand the technical challenges,they feel very comfortable  in theBitcoin ecosystem, and they can understand some of the design tradeoffs. Ithink where things can be improved is actually for, even like designers, our UXpeople are our product people, right? Like, where some of the technologiesmight come across as like more clunky or less polished to them.

Whereas if you compare to some other ecosystems wherelet's  imagine the skillset of someonewho's not going to take a deep dive into the core technology. They're justgoing to be like, "Hey, I trust that the underlying stuff is just going towork, I'm not going to independently think about it." But the UX is very,very polished and you know, the tutorials are like very well done and I thinkit attracts a certain type of audience. And I think this is something[00:16:00] that, the bitcoin ecosystem in general can attract that type oftalent more and not just like very deep, engineers who are working on the coreinfrastructure and the core protocols.

I think similarly,like for example, it's, it's also, I do think there's a need for education alot as well. Let  me give one specificexample because it comes up a lot, right?

As soon as you started having a discussion about web three,like either on Bitcoin or some of their chain, the first question you startedgetting is, "Hey, what's your transactions per second?" Right? Andthe transactions per second is like such a meaningless metric because it reallyboils down to  what type ofdecentralization are you willing to achieve? Right? Is it truly a globalnetwork from home computers or is it like some data center chain that you'rebuilding? Right?

then the second thing is like your bottleneck. If you lookat any like smart contract platform, the bottleneck is actually your [00:17:00]local processing, right?

Like how, like we are doing some benchmarks on the claritylanguage. It's not about the network event, it's actually  your local execution bottlenecks or a diskIO, that would limit  how manytransactions a smart contract language is really being able to process andpeople don't think of these terms and they're throwing these insane numbersthat my blockchain does, like X transactions per second, and Bitcoin only doeslike this.

Whereas once people started realizing that those numbers arereally meaningless in real world settings or they're really driven more bymarketing than anything else. And the model that is emerging is, like Bitcoinas the reserve currency or Bitcoin has the settlement layer. Like you go, youcan go and settle thousands of transactions on Bitcoin, but when you settlethem, and again, sometimes I get that so our blockchain, it runs with Bitcoin'sfinality. So then sometimes people say, "oh, that's slow". And then Igo back with, "well, you really want things to be actually final when  you hit [00:18:00] finality". Right? Soworking with Bitcoin's finality, like there's no better finality than Bitcoin'sfinality.

And I think there's a massive opportunity for educationright now for explaining these concepts to the broader developer ecosystem thatthey should be asking these questions when they see the marketing material andwhen they see kind of like these claims about some systems. Whereas ifanything, I think the Bitcoin ecosystem is more raw and more honest about, youknow what is actually there.

Tyler Evans: Sure.Definitely. Anyone else want to take a stab at what are any of those missinginfrastructure pieces that  people shouldbe building on Bitcoin that maybe they aren't today?

Alex Bosworth: Ilike this concept that we've introduced in lightning called TLV, which, kindof, is a way to attach a metadata data layer onto payments and that's somethingI think is very exciting. I mean, if you consider that you have these nodesalready that are [00:19:00] ready to receive and send payments, the idea thatyou could offer these APIs and network of nodes that could offer us, you know,extensible API APIs that could be triggered, using monetization  that also includes information about what youwant the API to do. I'd like to see more people building on that cause I thinkit's just so cool. Like what if I could just launch a node and now I can makesome money doing something.

Allen Piscitello: Okay.In terms of what's missing? I mean, I think, I think really it is getting usto  that "normie" layer rightthere. There  are so many concepts inBitcoin that just are counterintuitive if you're just used to that kind ofcentralized, traditional financial system where you have trusted intermediariesand you can have some guarantees.

And so, you know, the idea of how do I make sure mytransaction makes it into a block, or how do I make sure that this payment ismade and who do I call when I, you know, if, if I want a refund, like all thesethings are concepts that people are used to and, and it's going to take some[00:20:00] kind of education to get, get back to, you know, what they have.

And I think really, you know, if you can build a UX that iscompatible with the concept of Bitcoin and really kind of guides people tounderstanding the new Bitcoin world while still being easily  understandable though, that's something thatwould be, you know, a huge missing piece to moving forward.

You know, making it so they don't necessarily need to knowall the details of it, but it's, it's kind of in the right bucket. This issomething I think that will help Bitcoin tremendously  that's missing  and will take some time to get built out. Ifyou look at what the internet was in the nineties,  it was pretty ugly.

iI wasn't until AOL that the masses really started adopting,and then it went back to, to what we see today. So I think, I think we're gonnasee a progression. We're kind of seeing the first wave where things kind of getcentralized and look like it is, but then we can go to a more true Bitcoinapproach with, with these infrastructure pieces that take longer to build.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: Iwant to add one thing that I think  iskey [00:21:00] for the expansion of Bitcoin. Like, I think we need to extendBitcoin to have some  interoperabilityfeatures that enable trustless, interoperability with side chains. I thinkthat's an experimental, you know, there have been many proposals likedrivechain.

We have been working on that, but I think we need to keeppushing the boundaries  in that area, so,we really can integrate the second layer solutions in a truly trustless andenabled side chains that are like fully part of the Bitcoin ecosystem and don'trequire any intermediaries  to function.I think  that's one thing where we can,we'll consolidate the, you know, asset as an ecosystem, because forexample,  RSK started in like two yearsago, it started with 5% of the hashing power of Bitcoin, protecting RSK. Andnow we have 50% at the moment, we reached [00:22:00] 69%. So from a economicalsecurity, RSK is twice or three times the security of Ethereum. But we stillneed the Federation to release funds back into the Bitcoin ecosystem.

And although there's a lot of methods you can use to makethe Federation you know, as neutral as possible. Still is a Federation andthere are ways we can enable him to pull decentralized and trust, minimizedinteroperability. So I think it will work with that. We can keep extending theecosystem in a ways that will, you know, use the network effect that money wasmentioned. Like, imagine that already RSK is the safest as smart contractplatform in the world, only by using half of the hashing power of Bitcoin.

So, and it's fully aligned with economically with, withBitcoin. So I think if we secure those, you know, two-way pegs also with theother sites is Liquid, Echo. We are working a lot on that area, [00:23:00] butwith minimum modifications or extensions of the Bitcoin protocol, I think we cansettle these, these expansion elements that we are building and that will bevery good.

I think then Bitcoin is unstoppable.

Muneeb Ali: Iwould, I would definitely plus one that, because this is, this is like, I thinkif we all agree that Bitcoin will always have a limited scripting language andit is not going to expand it, which I think is the absolutely the rightdecision. You don't want to introduce like security nightmares at the coreBitcoin layer but then that means that more fuller languages are going to existsomewhere else, but  it should bepossible to move Bitcoin from the base layer to somewhere else and then bringit back. Because, like imagine the kind of innovation that's happening in thedecentralized finance, defi space, and that, that one thing can enable so muchdefi around Bitcoin because you can't really have full smart contracts at thebase layer.

But you need that, that [00:24:00] link basically that, youknow, you are able to go to a side chain or a different chain and then comeback. Like, we, we tackle this problem, by requiring our miners to basicallylook at both the state of Bitcoin and the state of the Stacks chain. Our minersdo the work of effectively watching two chains.

And we still can, you know, this is still in the R&Dstages, we still can do this trustless and like locking a Bitcoin on theBitcoin chain and then migrating it or releasing it back like it's still anopen problem.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: Yes.Then the miners become decentralization part, so that's why I think we need towork, not, not extending, I'm not talking about going full Turing complete, I'mjust talking about like things that we can implement with zero knowledge proofand very basic things that are not, you know, blockchain intensive. And they,and they, they cannot be used as a vector of attack. Very specific things thatcan enable [00:25:00] trustless transfer of value. Not, not, not bringing thefull, you know, surveys of attack of more fully, doing complete smart contractsbut only enable trustless transfer of locking and transfer.

So it's more, I was not going in the direction of bringingfull scripting capabilities, only bringing like very specific things that willenable trustless lock and release of funds based on, on secondary side chains.

We are working on some things on that area with the zeroknowledge proof that that can be implemented and  will help the whole sidechain ecosystem, it'snot specific for for RSK, but I agree with many of that. We don't want toincrease the surface of attack of Bitcoin. Bitcoin has one purpose that isbeing the most secure, decentralized, and that was another topic that Muneebmentioned as well as I think is a very good but important, decentralization.

If you do 400 transactions per second on chain, then youhave a [00:26:00] blockchain that is growing at one terabyte per year. So whois going to be able to validate that blockchain? So you are reducingdecentralization by making the blockchain grow, you know, at high speed. Soit's not about how many TPS is about preserving the core values of Bitcoin that are decentralization,neutrality, censorship resistance. So we need to keep that bottom layer, thatfoundational layer safe and protected. But, enable just enough to make theprotocol grow somewhere else.

Tyler Evans: Totally.Diego, you mentioned like some zero knowledge proofs.

Are there any other, you know, layer one changes that youguys are looking at that would help  yourbusinesses or your projects be able to build on top of Bitcoin? You know, we'vegot Schnorr signatures and we've got Taproot in the BIP stage.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: Wellon RSK, [00:27:00] we are, we have already implemented zero knowledge groupslike ZK-Snarks and things that because of the of the Turing complete capabilities,you can do that. So we are really experimenting with that. And, and alsoworking with what is called a optimistic relapse or commit change that enableyou to consolidate  tens of thousands oftransactions or millions of transactions into a single proof that it's a fixedsize, which is very interesting  ofcourse, and this is something I discussed with Adam Back, many times it waslike, there's always trade off. It's like you, you scale up and you are tradingoff security.

That's why we don't want to be, you know, compete withBitcoin in terms of security, because even if we have a hundred percent of thehashing power protecting RSK, still its a different surface of attack. And Ithink that was what Muneeb was trying to say like, you, you can all, but youcan have like middle.

Middle level of security networks, [00:28:00] and then youcan have more consolidated networks that do this commit chains, but enable youto scale further, and then, you know, you can have the financial system of theworld running on these multiple layers in these networks of networks. That'swhy I like this internet of value, you know, metaphor, because in that way,it's like, okay, you are doing tradeoff in security for different use cases. Ifyou want the reserve of value of the world, you want Bitcoin. You don't wantnothing less than Bitcoin in terms of security, centralization. But if you wantto do like a payment network for a, for a, you know, a corporation or for amunicipality, then you can have some tradeoff and use certain things that areless secure in certain timeframe. But then our set alone is safer network, muchlike what Muneeb was mentioning. So, that's where we are already working on those models. And I think that's[00:29:00] that together with payment channels, you know, I think cancreate  an off chain architecture thatcan scale Bitcoin to process hundreds of thousands of transactions withoutproblem.

Allen Piscitello: Ithink it's choosing your trust model that works best for your application.There's always going to be trade offs. With lightning, you have a reactivesecurity model, but it requires liquidity. You have with liquid, there's aFederation, but you're doing this with something that you might already trustto exchange for your funds anyway. With Rootstock, you know, you're trustingthe miners to, to be so decentralized enough for that to work.  

It's choosing the model that works best for your applicationand having many choices is good. You can have pure custody on top of Bitcoin,but you couldn't have the reverse. You could not have a centrally issued coinessentially controlled, but then has this decentralized layer on top of it.That's just not possible.

So it's really important to keep that base layer free, keepit centralized, keep it censorship [00:30:00] free. And we can build whateveryou want on top of it, across the spectrum. So I think that's, you know, beingable to choose those trade offs. There's not a right answer. depending on whatyou're doing.

Tyler Evans: Youknow, Muneeb like you mentioned, there's this conception that, you know,building on Bitcoin is scarier, or it's harder to get up to speed or, you know,it requires more. cryptography knowledge to be able to interact with itcompared to some of the, you know, projects with more marketing and tutorialsout there.

What would each of you guys say to developers who areinterested in building on Bitcoin but didn't know where to get started?

Alex Bosworth: Imean, I would use lightning personally because, It's so easy. Like the problemwith a lot of these like, alternative chains is, you have to like, wait a longtime for finality and you have to deal with [00:31:00] this fact that likeblockchains can go in reverse. Oh, you had to think that maybe like a block isgoing to reorg and now you have to deal with what happens if my confirmation isactually decreased. There's all sorts of things, complicated things, and youhave to worry about, "oh, I'm spending real money on blockchain fees, so Ihave to test it on a special test net, and I need a special test netcoins". Whereas if you just jumped in with lightning, the model is verysimple. You make a payment, it either succeeds or fails pretty much instantly.

How much are you spending in fees when you're testing outyour software? Basically nothing, most of the time.

I feel like it really gets back to that old kind ofapplication developer model where it's like, I just want to, you know, installsome software and awesome tools, and then I want to really focus on building myapplication and delivering value that way.

I don't want to worry too much about like what's theplatform.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: I'ma little bit in line with that, I think. I think, you know, maybe buildingdirectly on Bitcoin is tough, although Simplicity is helping in a lot of ways.I think there are a lot of improvements, but I see, [00:32:00] I think, youknow, the second layer solutions and lighting is a great example of, of greatlibraries and that make it easier. I mean, maybe the life or the developereasier, I think.

You know, many projects also like has these like upper levelwhere you are building on foundations that are rarely tested. So you are moreabstracted. There was a confusion that building directly on blockchain or evenin smart contracts is like building web applications.

And that's not the case. More closer to Bionics. It's likeif you, if you screw with is my contract, then you can lose millions of dollarsor you know, or, or if you are doing important things for an organization, youcan screw up the organization. So you don't want to have like every programmerworking on the low level.

It's like programming an assembler on IBM. You don't wantpeople that is not very knowledgeable in that programming there. But you cancreate [00:33:00] abstractions. You can create libraries for the common usecases. Let's say, you know, an escrow agreement, and then a high levelprogrammer that is more accustomed to use, to develop applications, can usethose building blocks to build their solution in the, in RSK infrastructureframework , that's what we are building. We are building libraries in thenative languages that users already know Python, JavaScript, Java. So, thetraditional developer can use all the same infrastructure without having tobecome an expert in low level programming of a smart contract.

So, and I think that's the way. It's like you don't wanteverybody being like an expert in assembler; we don't use assembler anymore.Except you are a printer driver programmer.

Allen Piscitello: Yeah.I think that's pretty accurate. There's a lot of misconceptions that you needto be, we need more protocol developers to do all these things.

And again, if you're, if you're an application developer,there is a wide variety of libraries and [00:34:00] tools and infrastructurefor you to go and start building with.

So I think it's better finding the right tool for the job of what's interesting for you. So, youknow, if you have like an asset based system, you may look at something like aside chain, like, like liquid.

If you wanted to do payments with micropayments and lots oftransfers, something like lightnings, you know, the tool chain to startbuilding on that is, is there. So, so really I think, you know, find somethingthat's interesting for you. Find the right tool for it, and, and start buildingthe applications.

And I think that's, that's, where there's, there's a lotmore demand, probably at least 10 X more application developers building on topof things than the actual protocol engineers.

Muneeb Ali: Yup.So one, one thing I would add is that this, that yes, there might be this,current scenario where, in some other ecosystems it might be easier in terms ofdocumentation or resources available for people to get started and then they'llhit the bottlenecks down the road.

Like, it's easy to demo things, right? That's something wediscussed. [00:35:00] I think the flip side of that is most people are stillgoing to get introduced to crypto through Bitcoin, right? So Bitcoin is kind oflike the first asset they hear about, or the first thing that they buy. And Ithink in many ways, the Bitcoin community has done a great job in simplifyingthe use case for Bitcoin, like basically being evangelists for it. That, that,you know, this is what Bitcoin is, this is why we are excited about it, andwhat I would like to see a lot more is that sort of excitement in the broader,kind of like innovation happening around Bitcoin and mostly in developercircles, right?

Like, imagine that, for example, on like Hacker News orother, you know, Twitter is pretty big in a Bitcoin ecosystem. Like, imaginelike, people are excited about the innovation happening around Bitcoin. Andincentives are pretty aligned for a lot of these projects because if moredevelopers are kind of getting introduced to crypto through Bitcoin, and thenthey discover the innovation happening in the Bitcoin ecosystem, it's prettymuch like that's the [00:36:00] funnel.

And then they, they don't even need to go to a smallerIsland because they're like, Oh, this is amazing. There's so much innovationhappening here. I'm excited to try out, like, all, all these different things.And I think that is one area where collectively the Bitcoin community could doa better job of just like experimentation mindset or educating people that looklike there is a lot of innovation happening around Bitcoin. And  this might be a misconception that all of theinnovation is actually happening somewhere else and Bitcoin is just never goingto change. And it is, it is what it is.

Tyler Evans: I couldn'tagree more Muneeb, I think, you know, that's a massive opportunity for us allto celebrate the innovation and the projects and the experiments that peoplecan and will and should build on Bitcoin. Even if, you know, they make somedifferent trade offs than you would make, or even if they might blow up andlose some people's money, as long as we're giving people the freedom toexperiment and the freedom to [00:37:00] choose what they lock up their Bitcoinin or, or what systems they use. it will make the system more resilient andmore antifragile over time.

All right, well, we're just about out of time, but I'll turnit over to you guys each for, you know, a last word if you want to plug yourproject or, or, tell folks how they should get involved with building onBitcoin.

Alex Bosworth: Yeah,I just wanted to touch on a new release from LND, which is 0.10. So we have anew feature which is that you can use multiple payment paths, multiple channelsto execute your payment and what we're really trying to do here is to make itmore accessible, more decentralized, the entire lightning network by aligningit with people's incentives for, for pain.

So instead of just. trying to find the biggest node that hasthe most capital in order to route your payment, now you can, you can choosefive different nodes that all have smaller amounts of capital committed, tomake that payment execution happen. And that's something we're also workingwith with lighting loop is we're trying to make it [00:38:00] so that if you wantto do a massive on chain send, but you want to aggregate your, your output withlots of other people's outfits, and you want to aggregate all the capitals hadlots of different channels that we can do that as, as compactly as possible onthe Bitcoin blockchain. So I would definitely play around with Loop and look atthose multipath payments, to see that, that innovation happening.

Tyler Evans: Awesome.I just upgraded my node yesterday.

Diego Gutierrez Zaldivar: Onour side, I think, you know, there's so many going on. Like we are RSK, we havethe RSK infrastructure framework, we have the social network we acquiredTaringa. So a lot of interesting things are coming there. Like we areintegrating crypto wallets in the social networks. So we are turning the socialnetwork into, into a social marketplace or peer to peer social marketplace.

But I think for developers, developers.rsk.co [00:39:00] isthe place to go. You can find a lot of tutorials and seem to work there. Andanother project that I am very excited us a bit is "Money on Chain".Money on Chain issued the first sustainable asset fully characterized withBitcoin without a third party is like a smart contract driven.

And I love it because it would withstand a 50% drop ofBitcoin, flawlessly when our protocols that are backed by crypto had sometrouble staying alive. So, so I think, you know, those are the kinds ofinnovations, like having a truly peer to peer monetary system where Bitcoin isthe gold backing this peer to peer monetary system.

For me, it's very exciting. And all the things why westarted with RSK in the first place, so there's a lot of things coming on, soif you follow me on Twitter @dieguito, you will see me posting all these kindsof things.

[00:40:00] Allen Piscitello: Yeah.So, for us, again, blockstream.com if you want to see us. We do a lot of ourdevelopment on the Elements project in GitHub. So that's where we do thedevelopment for c-lightning, where we also do development for Liquid, if youwant to use Liquid is a node you run is called Elements. so that's all all outthere.

Feel free to put it out that we have the transaction feesare now lower than they were before. So you're looking at pretty cheaptransactions to get confidential transactions and also issue assets. So this issome exciting projects on Liquid. We have a Green Wallet, which you can use to,to hold assets on Bitcoin and Liquid, as well.

So this is some of the projects that you can get involvedin. And then, we're also launching the Liquid securities platform. So staytuned for some more information for that. So I'll help you, issue securitytokens on, on Liquid, that have restrictions to, to comply. So we'll be talkingmore about that and the next couple of weeks. [00:41:00]

Muneeb Ali: Sofor, for Blockstack, I think, a big thing going on is the launch of the Stacks2.0 blockchain and our tests went live. So if you want to play around with it.And the interesting thing there is like this really, idea of interconnectingwith Bitcoin, right? So even, people who are like stacks holders can actuallyearn Bitcoin by participating in consensus and instead of burning  electricity, the miners are transferringBitcoin on the Bitcoin chain and that's why they actually view a stage on bothblockchain. But I think that's, that's at the just the blockchain side.

if you're a developer, we have actually spent a lot of timesimplifying developer libraries, especially if you're just a JavaScriptdeveloper, even even like, interacting with the blockchain or having databaselike interfaces that can help you, get up and running with applications prettyquickly.

And, and people should really try out, let me, let me namesome apps, right? So there's a app called NoteRiot which is like a privacyfocused note [00:42:00] taking app. I mean, these, these things are live.People can just like start using it. There's another app called Dmails, whichis like a Gmail, like service completely built on top of Blockstack, which iskind of like anchored to Bitcoin, right?

So you can see the almost like the internet emerging, right?Like someone has built an email service that works and scales today. Right?It's just that, you know, the, we need to raise more awareness around thesethings. And the, and the last one would be, the service called Runkod. So.Yeah, code is like KOD, which is a website publishing tool, again, it iscompletely live. I think they just released a new version where people can goand publish their decentralized websites, through the Stacks blockchain anchoredinto Bitcoin.

And I think these are the developers I wanted to highlight.Obviously I can highlight all of them, but these are the developers that weshould be celebrating because they are innovating around the, the Bitcoinecosystem and building these useful services.

The average users, average internet users can, can actuallyuse and [00:43:00] experience what a Web3.0 can look like.

Tyler Evans: Awesome,Muneeb. Well, thank you guys for joining us today. Happy having everyone.Looking forward to this next epoch and seeing what people will build onBitcoin.

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