Podcasting 2.0 for November 29th, 2024, episode
202, Walletpocalypse.
Hey, hello, everybody.
Oh, yeah, bright and early.
We got the coffee flow in time for
the official board meeting of Podcasting 2.0.
This is where we discuss it all.
And there's a lot to talk about today,
including the Wallapocalypse, or whatever we're going to
call it.
This is the only boardroom that serves brunch
on casual Fridays.
I'm Adam Curry here in the heart of
the Texas Hill Country and in Alabama, the
man who can stop a hell thread dead
in its tracks.
Say hello to my friend on the other
end, the one and only Mr. Dave Jones.
Is this business casual today?
It's not even business casual, just casual casual.
I wore jeans.
Yeah, jeans.
Yeah, you have a t-shirt or I
got a hoodie.
So I figured that would be good.
Yeah, I've got a hoodie.
Here we are, everybody in the United States.
It is the day after my mic sounds
weird.
Does this sound weird to you?
It sounds okay to me.
Yeah.
Well, I made a huge mistake this morning.
Yeah, I gotta be honest.
I did it.
It was you.
You installed updates.
Yeah, I sure did.
You did, guess what?
I did too.
For the Roadcaster?
No, no, for Ubuntu.
I've been refreshing the Roadcaster to see if
there's been an update for a long time.
You installed updates on the Roadcaster this morning?
Yes.
Oh, that was deadly.
I know, I know.
I'm like, why am I even doing this?
Because you can first download it and it's
downloading and you scan the code to see
what the update will be.
And I'm looking at it's like, oh, new
virtual inputs.
And oh, this is an exciting update.
Install.
Oh no, why am I doing that?
Yeah, you know, you're asking yourself why you're
saying I shouldn't do this as you hit
the button.
Yeah, I know that.
There must be a psychological thing with that
where you're like, I know I shouldn't, but
I'm going to do it anyway.
It's complete stupidity is what it is.
Anyway, I did it.
There we go.
So we are early.
It is the day after Thanksgiving here in
the United States, a day where we honor
people with turkeys and funny hats and belt
buckles on their shoes.
And their belt buckles on their hats.
And on the hats is right.
And today, of course, even though Thanksgiving is
not celebrated, I think Canada celebrates their own
Thanksgiving in October.
We do today.
Friday is a great tradition in the United
States, which is, I think, a global phenomenon
at this point known as Black Friday, Black
Friday, Black Friday.
So we're celebrating that by by purchasing nothing.
It's more like Black Friday is less of
a day now and more like a month.
It lasts forever.
Forever.
It's true.
It is one of, it's kind of disgusting.
Oh, it's horrible.
Like, that's the most, it's the worst part
of, you know, capitalism is the, is the
best of the worst thing that we have.
You know, like, it's, it's not like, like,
nothing, no other economic system has the benefit
to, has the benefit to bad stuff.
It's 930 in the morning.
I'm struggling here.
It's all right.
I'm having trouble listening to you.
Don't worry.
No, no other economic system has a closer
to one to one pro con ratio than
capitalism, but that doesn't mean that there's no
cons.
And one of them is just rampant commercialization
of everything in our entire life.
And Black Friday represents the worst of that.
Yeah.
And, and it really hit me this morning
as I was looking at my Bible app
and the Bible app had some Black Friday
offer.
Oh, no, no.
Like, what is that?
Oh, man.
Um, thank you, Chad.
I just, uh, I just pinged the pod.
I completely forgot to update to live and
hit the pod ping.
So that's why there's not, not everybody's here.
I'm sure.
And of course it's Thanksgiving and it's holiday.
It's the winter holiday season.
So I woke up sick two days ago.
Yeah.
I mean, it's just, you know, I usually
typically, I usually get sick around Thanksgiving and
then it goes away sometime in March.
Yeah.
Buckle up.
My dog caught on fire last night.
Okay.
I'll bite your dog caught on fire.
Yeah.
So we, um, we had the kids over
for, uh, Thanksgiving supper and, uh, had all
the, um, we had all the stuff like,
you know, I mean, it's such a great
Thanksgiving meal and Melissa had put some of
these little candles out on the windowsills in
the, in the diner.
I'm already feeling it.
Yeah.
And the, these are all, this is an
old house.
And so the, the windows are less, they're
really stretchy.
You know, they go down real low to
the, they, they go down to about two
feet off the floor.
And my dog is like 105 pounds when
I'm sitting down, his head comes up to
almost my shoulder.
Yeah.
And so, yeah, big, big guy.
And he's, he's in, he's a great Pyrenees.
So he's in full fluff right now, like
three, four inches of fluff all over him.
Cause for went for winter and he comes
over and it's like staring at me, we're
playing a game after dinner, we're playing a
board game and he's staring at me and
I, and I look, I look at him
and I, everybody's, we, we all at once
sort of like stare, like, like turn and
look because we hear this like crackling sound.
Yeah.
We hear a crackling sizzle and we all
look over to him and then I'm like,
Oh my God, he's on fire.
His butt was over one of the candles
and his butt was on fire.
So I like jumped up and like started
hitting him and knocking the fire off.
He never even knew because he's so fluffy.
Here we go.
Yes.
That was it.
What is that?
I smell over here in the, in the,
in the pod Sage household.
Hmm.
He thought I was, he thought I was
giving him a spanking for, he did something
wrong, but he didn't do it.
He never even noticed.
I'm telling you, this fire was as big
as my hand.
Oh no.
Yeah.
That's great.
He's got a big chunk out of his
fur on the back of his butt.
Oh man.
I mean, I've heard good Thanksgiving stories.
This is, this is, this beats most of
them.
A friend of his grandma keeled over dead
into her, into her, into her plate of
food at the table.
Yeah.
That happened once.
That's pretty good.
And then they just propped her back up
and kept on eating.
No he did not.
Yes.
Shut up.
Yes.
While they waited, because she was old and
they were kind of expecting it.
That's not an excuse.
I don't know.
I feel like that beats the dog story.
No, no, that's the, I like the dogs
on fire and no one told me the
dog doesn't even know it.
Bet he smelled horrible in the room.
Oh yeah.
Burnt dog fur was, is not the right
ambiance for Thanksgiving.
So we are, we're doing the board meeting.
First of all, because, well, we can, but
also we really wanted to, and we weren't
able to do, now, did we not do
a board meeting last week?
That's right.
Yeah.
We didn't.
Do we, do we miss one?
No, we did.
Yeah, we did.
We did two weeks ago.
We missed the board meeting.
Right.
Okay.
No, but Oscar couldn't make it.
And we wanted to have Oscar on to
talk about the, the walletpocalypse.
Yeah.
How everything's broken.
Yes.
And, and in, in between, in between the
last board meeting and today's board meeting, it
has been, it's been a bumpy ride for
some of the passengers on, on, on the,
podcasting 2.0 health thread.
There was a, there was a health thread,
but you know, as health threads go and
as communities go, wow, congratulations to all of
us for kind of pulling through it, like
a huge dysfunctional family reunion where a fight
broke out and then, you know, people are
like, you know, threatening to throw chairs and
there's a bloody nose or two, but then
it all kind of just, it kind of
calmed down.
And I was proud of us.
I really wasn't like, look at us.
We didn't, we didn't explode.
No one, uh, rage quit and forked off,
you know, the whole, you know, the whole
namespace or anything like that.
I mean, seriously for a, what are we,
a four-year-old community?
That was impressive.
That was, and, and I was just as,
as guilty of it as anybody else.
Well, I mean, everybody just kind of, you
know, griped and yelled at each other and
then sat down and had checks mix.
Checks mix.
It was fine.
I mean, of course everybody's, everybody's gripey and
aggravated because, you know, we have to change
fundamentals here and it sucks.
I mean, there's nothing great about having to
go and re engineer a spec that everybody
was already used to.
That's never going to make anybody happy.
It doesn't make me happy.
I hate it.
Um, but you know, I mean, it is,
it is what it is.
And the thing is like specs, you know,
I'm sure we'll get into this with Oscar,
but specs will, um, they become a victim
of their own success always, always.
And you just really can't, you, you can't
let that own you.
You have, when the changes need to happen,
you have to change them.
And if you, if you don't, if you
don't, if you're not willing to ever break
anything and move to a different model, this
spec will just die.
It, it's just like, you can't, you can't
force it.
Yeah.
So, you know, it's time to, it's time
to break some stuff and it sucks.
So there were a couple of things going
on that I noticed.
First, there was a general misunderstanding of terms
of, uh, different elements that were being talked
about.
Not everybody has the same level of understanding
of the lightning network or different payment protocols.
Um, yeah, there are also different agendas.
There's, you know, there's a general, not everyone
sees a wallet as, you know, a listener
wallet as something different from a podcaster wallet.
Um, you know, there's the app developers have
different issues that they need to deal with
for, uh, for payment wallets versus podcasters.
Um, there's also what is kind of beautiful
and also out of the ordinary for our
development community is that we don't really sit
down and I'll write a spec on GitHub
and then say, okay, this is it.
Let's go and implement it.
No, we, we, we break off into little
places and we go, Hey, uh, you know,
three or four people are in that corner
and let me try and build this over
here.
And, and I think that was, that was
quite confusing for, um, I know it was
probably for Boomi who was like, well, what
are you doing?
You have no spec, you know, and, and
he hasn't really been a part of that
process where we, where we just run with
scissors and make stuff happen.
And so I wound up actually in the
Stephen Bell telegram group, the general group of
the Stephen Bell telegram, uh, cinematic universe.
Yes.
No, the SBCU.
Yes, exactly.
And, and, you know, Eric PP was in
there and, um, you know, and, and then
there's also a contingent, um, just trying to
get it all out there and make sure
I covered all the bases, you know, when,
when we started this podcast index, just to
go back to the Genesis was really for
one main reason is to enable, uh, people
to have a place to develop apps and
services on an index, a database with an
API of all podcasts who want to be
published in it.
And without fear of, you know, political or
any other reasons other than strict 100%
U S legal code where we couldn't have
that RSS feed made available, uh, which I
think has been, or, you know, we're just
taking stuff out that has, you know, that
is not, you know, like a test test
one, two from, uh, from anchor.
So we, we don't, we try to kick
that out.
Uh, and Simon, so that was for deplatforming
that it all started with, with, uh, Apple
taking things out of their index that P
everyone was talking to.
And then the financial platforming, which for over
four years ago was pretty rampant.
It's not that it's led up that much.
And that kind of crossed over into value
for value with the idea that you could
be sending value back to a podcaster while
you were listening initially streaming.
And then later on the group actually developed
the boost and the booster gram.
Um, and we chose the lightning network because
at the time, and arguably still is, you
know, the best kind of open source way
to do this with micropayments, um, best in,
in, in the term best encompasses a whole
lot of things.
Like, it's not just, it doesn't mean technical.
It also means best it best as far
as like technical trade-offs, um, adoption of
the underlying currency is all kinds of things.
Yeah.
And, uh, and so what that brought with
it was, uh, people with, uh, people with
Bitcoin, Bitcoin ethos.
Um, so, and you know, that's, that's been
a kind of a bubbling under thing in
general.
So, and we get into these almost religious
things like, well, you're using high for podcasting
2.0. It's a shit coin.
You're not real Bitcoin.
It's not, we're just trying to make solutions,
make stuff that works, that will work long
-term.
Um, so, so kind of stuff like that
came into it.
And so, and that just made for a
big, big ball of a gooey mess.
And so here we are, and it really,
it's all Oscar's fault.
Good morning, Oscar.
How are you?
Hey guys.
It's all your fault.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Yes.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, brother.
Thank you.
You guys don't have any type of, I
mean, certainly not the same day.
Do you have any kind of Thanksgiving type
celebrations in the, in the UK?
I think we probably have the same vibe
at Christmas, you know, everyone just getting together
and having fun and, you know, spending time
with family.
So it's probably a similar vibe.
And then the next day y'all hit
each other with, uh, with boxing gloves, boxing,
boxing day, boxer day, boxer day, boxing day,
boxing, boxing day.
Yeah.
Boxing day is the, uh, the football day
in the UK though, because they play, I
think it's the only day of the year
where every team in the Premier League plays.
So most people are just sat at home
watching football, right?
That's very similar to our, to our, uh,
Christmas, but certainly Thanksgiving here.
It's like everyone's, you know, having fun, being
thankful.
And in the corner of the TV is
with the, the New York, uh, the New
York versus Dallas, you know, it's like, we
got to have that game on, got to
see what's going on with our team at
all Detroit versus somebody.
Yeah.
So Dave, where do you want to start
with Oscar?
You want to hit him below the knee
and then we're all kind of crouched behind
him and you push him over me.
So he falls backwards.
One of those.
Yeah.
If you gut punch him into me, I'll
get, yeah.
Let's see.
Um, well, I think I want to start
with the whole, with what you released last
week, the proof of concept for the pay,
uh, pay a podcast.
Um, this it's open, it's open source, uh,
I believe, but have you opened that to,
is it a public repo yet?
Yeah.
So I've actually just updated it today.
That's kind of why I was scrambling around,
but yeah, it's on a new domain now.
Oh yes.
I see.
It's gone.
The original is the full, the full repo
is open source.
And also as part of the repo, um,
I've actually worked on a library that you
can pull into your own project if you
want.
Um, so what I'll do is just, um,
maybe like share the links in, um, stick
it in the board room and I can
pick it up.
Yeah.
If you stick it in there, that'd be
great.
But yeah, basically there's three URLs that are
useful.
There's the main URL, which I just went
and bought a domain called pod pay.org.
Um, oh, okay.
Great.
Deployed it there.
And then there's the GitHub link, which has
the full link to basically what you see
on pod pay.org, which is the demo
site.
And then there's also a, uh, JSR, which
is a JavaScript package manager.
There's also a link to the library that
the live demo is using.
So if anyone else wants to, um, it
looks like that last link didn't go through
the JSR one, but yeah, that's like a
library that you can use that makes like
some of the stuff, um, around Ellen address
a little bit easier.
So yeah, that's where the demo is.
And yeah, it's essentially the same thing as
you guys talked about on the last show
with the addition of an idea on how
we can share the boost metadata, because obviously
I think as people rightly pointed out, um,
you know, this past week, the big issue
with bolts 11 is that most of the
providers limit the character account for the memo
to 200 characters.
So, you know, trying to put everything that
we had in the, uh, keys and TLV
that kind of won't really work.
So yeah, it's all there.
Encourage people to play around with it.
And I'm happy to kind of talk through
it if that's helpful.
Yeah.
Why don't you just, well, you, I mean,
you heard what we talked about last week
and you saw the comments and I think
you may have actually talked to the Albie
guys this week.
Um, can you just give your overall, uh,
I've got my impressions of where we're at
right now, but what, what do you think
about where we're at?
Yeah.
I'll, I'll try and give my best like
high level, uh, overview and thoughts on where
we're at.
So I guess like, I think one thing
that was maybe, um, made this situation feel
a little bit more intense than it actually
is, is because I think there's actually multiple
things happening here and they're not actually linked.
They just happened to be, you know, happening
right now.
And actually it's beneficial that we do them
all at once.
Um, so I guess from my perspective, there's
like three things that I think we kind
of need to do to take podcasting 2
.0 payments and the value spec to like
the next level and make it easier for
more people to participate.
I think the first is the onboarding issue.
Um, it's just very difficult and also confusing
for people that are new to Bitcoin to
kind of enter this world and send their
first payment.
And one of the things we've seen time
again with fountain is that, you know, once
people get over that, um, kind of once
people jump through that hoop, then they love
it.
But if you've never purchased Bitcoin before, it's
very, very difficult.
So I think solving the onboarding is a
key piece.
I think making the UX of sharing the
payment payment info easier is also a key
piece.
And then finally separating the boost metadata from
the payment is also a key piece.
And I think the most important one of
these is the onboarding and it's onboarding for
all of the kind of players it's onboarding
for listeners, it's onboarding for app developers, it's
onboarding for podcasters.
And I think the thing that's held us
back is key sent.
And, you know, key send is amazing as
a protocol, but the challenge with it is
that it's not really seeing adoption outside of
podcasting 2.0. And, you know, there's every
kind of like couple of months, there's new
players in the lightning wallet space, you know,
there's multinational banks that are adding support for
lightning.
And every time we see one of these
new wallets, the thing that they always add
is the lightning address and bolt 11.
And none of them are adding key send
and none of them really have a reason
to add key send because it's just not
really used outside of podcasting 2.0. I
think we might be like the only, you
know, people actually using it on a regular
basis.
Last last of the Mohicans here.
Yeah, exactly.
And it works really well.
It's just that it's just confusing to users
because and the thing with lightning address is
that it's amazing user experience.
It makes sense to people because it's just
like an email address.
And so we have to say is, this
is like an email address for money, go
and get one from your favorite wallet, and
then you're ready to go.
But the issue we've had is that people
would do that they'd go and get a
strike lightning address, they'd go and get, you
know, another wallet lightning address.
And then there's that other step, which is
actually Oh, no, you actually need a new
lightning address, which is a key send enabled
lightning address.
And then in order to share that with
someone, you have to find the value block
like custom TLV stuff and share that.
And I think that onboarding barrier is like
really kind of like, holding us back.
And for me, that's like a big thing
to try and solve.
Now, let me stop.
Let me let me stop.
So you're because you're talking about two, you're,
you're talking about two different sort of onboarding
problems here, you're talking about the onboarding problem
of just getting a getting a listener into
the micropayment lightning ecosystem.
And then you're also talking about the problem
of onboarding from the standpoint of a tech
of a wallet that does support the key
send that's required.
Yeah.
And so like that, I think those are
important, because you, you're, I think you're exactly
right, where we there's a lot of things
happening all at once, and they're not necessarily
connected.
But you have the key send issue is
putting a barrier in front of people that
makes it even more hard.
It's not the same as just onboarding somebody
into a wallet to begin with, but it
adds just an extra set of problems where
you exclude a whole set of wallets that
could have been used before then now they
can't be.
Exactly.
Yeah.
And I think one of the most important
things to to kind of think about with
this is that lightning adoption is happening region
by region and country by country.
And actually, the best wallets for people in
one particular country are often the local, you
know, lightning wallets that, you know, they're set
up in that country, the team are in
that country, you know, all of the materials,
the education is in that language.
And, you know, that just allowing someone to
download their local country wallet and have a
lightning address and then participate in all of
the cool things that lightning enables podcasting 2
.0 being one of them is that's way
easier than having to onboard to a lightning
wallet and then essentially onboard again to a
different wallet.
Yes.
And kind of like go through the whole
thing again.
And also, you know, even if you are
able to do those two things, it just
creates this kind of like friction where you're
like, hold on a minute.
I thought lightning was supposed to be this
interoperable thing.
But actually, it's not because, you know, I
thought I had a lightning address.
I only need one email address.
Why do I need another one for podcasting?
Before we move beyond this, and I don't
know what you're seeing, because you may be
a bit closer to it.
But here in the United States, I'm seeing
the adoption of the lightning network.
And in this case, bolt 11 and maybe
bolt 12.
But just, you know, the the basic LN
URL functionality of lightning payments.
I'm seeing this being integrated into all kinds
of financial services.
Many banks have it already where you can
deposit and withdraw money through lightning.
I we've heard from PayPal, because we're no
agenda uses PayPal.
And we're we're, you know, we're a customer,
at least they pay attention to, they say
that some Bitcoin slash lightning functionality is coming.
Cash app has something that you can do
with lightning.
I'm not even sure.
Do you see a general move towards financial
services using the lightning network purely for their
own benefit of instant settlements and low fees
and not really having to deal with counterparty
risk?
You see this rolling out more and more?
Yeah, 100% I do.
And what's cool about it is there's so
many different like categories of businesses that are
starting to adopt lightning, you know, you have
the like, you know, I guess, pure play
lightning wallets, then you have the, you know,
neo banks adding support for lightning, then you
have the local exchanges in each region adding
lightning because it makes, you know, the purchasing
of Bitcoin more valuable.
Then you have like the huge companies like
light spark, which are kind of trying to
onboard even, you know, bigger kind of entity.
So I think it's definitely happening.
Like the, the adoption of lightning is happening.
It's just the adoption of lightning is the
adoption of bolt 11 and lightning address.
And that's what I think we kind of
need to, you know, realign to so that
we can just say to people, all you
need to participate in podcasting 2.0 is
a lightning address.
You want to be added to splits.
Just give me your lightning address.
You want to send a payment, you just
need a lightning address.
You want to receive a payment, you just
need a lightning address.
Yeah, my own experience.
Earlier this week, a friend of mine who
has a podcast and you know, he was
able through rss.com to get his, his
Albi wallet connected and all that stuff more
than a year ago.
But he literally had his wallet just filled
with stuff.
And he's like, I don't really know what
to do with it.
Also, I really kind of want to buy
Bitcoin.
And you know, so I said, well, look
at Swan, look at Coinbase.
And his, you know, his eyes are rolling
around the whole scanning.
And the invoice is so counterintuitive.
And so I said, well, let's let's set
you up with the strike wallet.
And the aha moment was almost immediate.
And then even could, even though it was
still consisted of scanning a QR code, the
connecting his strike to fountain with which he
uses was Oh, okay.
Well, okay.
So now just everything goes through strike.
And that's my connection to my bank.
And yes, yeah.
So that it was beautiful to see that
because he had really been struggling on how
do I get this stuff out?
How do I get to spend this in
dollars?
You know, he never really, it didn't matter
how many times I showed him.
He, you know, a month later be like,
you know, could you help me with that
wallet thing again?
Because I really don't quite understand it.
And now just like, Oh, exactly.
As you said, Oh, I just I can
use this email address, which is, you know,
his first name, last name, name at strike
.me says, Oh, okay.
I get this.
And, you know, just the light bulb went
on.
It was beautiful to watch.
Yeah, exactly.
And we see this again and again and
again, and, you know, yeah, you know, fountain
and all the other podcasting 2.0 apps,
like we want to build podcast apps with
cool, you know, payment experiences and other new
features that elevate podcasting.
We don't want to be spending our time,
like integrating with on-ramp providers and like,
you know, integrating, you know, KYC providers and,
you know, banking integrations, that kind of stuff.
You know, that's what the companies like strike
are going to do really well.
And by using OAuth and also by using
Nosta Wallet Connect, which I think is another
great option that maintains that non-custodial option.
It allows the podcast app developers to just
defer that work.
And there's so much work there, you know,
both on the technical side, the education, the
support, like everything, just defer that to the
actual wallet companies, just like, just like we've
been doing with, you know, Albi so far,
and, you know, we'll continue to work with
Albi.
I think what they've done with the Albi
Hub is amazing.
And, you know, Fountain is going to add
support for Nosta Wallet Connect.
So you can actually log into Fountain with
your Albi Hub.
So we very much see it as there
being two options for people to get started.
You can, you know, do an OAuth connection
with someone like Strike, which is going to
be the like easiest first step, the most
kind of familiar for users.
And then once you become a little bit
more advanced, you could make the decision to,
okay, I want to go and set up
an Albi Hub and use my Albi Hub
across all of the, you know, lightning apps
that are available.
And, you know, the apps support that too.
So I think just giving people those two
options makes the onboarding way easier.
So, yeah, let me, so you, from the
10,000 foot view, I think, I think
the most, one of the most important things
you said is that we have a lot
of things changing at once that aren't necessarily
connected, but sort of all need to be
done.
And one of the things that, so to
just kind of further flesh that out a
little bit, every, you said every, you know,
wallet has, everybody's wallet is local.
So you might have something like Chive Wallet
in El Salvador, Strike Wallet, you know, in
the US and where it's supported, Cash App,
these various wallets that are available to people.
And that's the one you would want to
connect with.
That also, it strikes me that that extends
to podcast apps as well, because each podcast
app, and I think this, the reason I'm
bringing this up is because I think this
addresses some of the things that Sam Sethi
said this week with some of the stuff
that he was talking about.
Every podcast app also has its own purpose
and its own inner, you know, and its
own sort of goals in mind.
So like Sam has taken, what Sam has
done is taken his true fans and wrapped
it in an onboarding process that's as easy
as he can make it using things like,
you know, Apple Pay and that kind of
thing to top up a sort of a
wallet that's obscured in what it is.
So you're not, you know, it's not lightning
necessarily, you can put lightning in, but it's
a true fan, sort of like genericized token
type of deal.
And so, and then, but then, you know,
in Fountain for Fountain, you know, for you
guys, you have, you know, Zebedee on the
back end.
So you have some keys in, so you're
doing a lot of things like saying, but
the reason I'm bringing that is because Sam
is like, well, I don't want people using
true fans as a lightning wallet.
You know, it's just not, I don't, I
don't want that as an, as the owner
of this product.
I don't think that's a good experience from,
for my product.
And that's completely fair and like legit.
And so if you're in that, you know,
if you're in that boat, like Sam is,
then you have a different set of priorities
on how you, on how you take care
of these things versus a different app that's
like, well, you know, I don't, I don't
really care about that.
Something like Castamatic, you know, or the split
kit, you know, or CurioCaster, where it's like,
well, I just want to, I don't, I
don't really have an infrastructure that's, you know,
built for payments at all.
Like true fans does.
I just want to connect to this other
thing and have them sort of do the
whole thing for me.
It, it just strikes me that that's another
sort of twist that makes this a little
complicated is because everybody's priorities for their own
podcast app is different.
Yeah.
That makes, that makes total sense.
And I think that, you know, whatever the
apps choose to do in terms of, you
know, features or the way that they manage
payments, I think that it's just, if you
want to participate in the payments that work
between the apps, we were not able to
do that with the fiat rails because you
essentially need like some permission layer in order
to send a payment.
You know, I think you could do anything
you wanted within your own app, but when
you're talking about paying a podcaster that from
an app where that podcaster is not of
that app, they don't know what that app
is, but the payments still work.
That's where you need lightning as the payment
rail between all of the players.
Well, strike is a good example of that
in and of itself, because in different countries,
it's not the same strike.
I mean, like you have, you have payments
going cross border through, through a crypt, you
know, through either a stable coin or lightning,
but then it, it always just comes out
through the banking system when you off board.
So like, even, even within strikes network itself,
I'm sure all their transactions on the, you
know, internally within their, you know, within borders
is probably SQL based when it crosses borders,
it has to go through some, you know,
some stable coin or lightning.
So there's the, and what you're saying is
like, well, within each app that can be
completely independent, you can do whatever you want,
but then as soon as it leaves your
app and goes to a different app, it
needs to be a common protocol.
And so that would be, you know, hopefully
bolt 11.
Yeah.
But I mean, the, the thing, you know,
Keysend, so I've got, I don't want to
get us, I don't want to get, get
you off your train of thought, but one
of the things that I was thinking about
this morning is Keysend.
I mean, can you pay a one set
invoice with bolt 11?
I mean, you can pay like, let's just
take the worst case scenario, which would probably
be the index.
Honestly, you know, we, we've always had a
1% split for any for, for things
coming out of the API is completely voluntary,
but a lot of people would send that
to us.
And a lot of times that ends up
being like one sat.
And so if you once, if you send
a Keysend with one sat, a lot of
times it works.
If you're lucky enough to go through some
routes that are zero base fee and that
kind of thing, you'll end up with a
one set transfer.
I don't know if, I don't know if
you can generate an LNURLP bolt 11 invoice
with one set.
Let me give you my experience.
So I put a, we did some running
with scissors experiments.
And so I put into the episode 201
of podcasting 2.0, I put a 2
% split and Eric PP did some, some
coding and he, he basically created a, you
know, a forked version of the, the boost
button on, on, on podcast index.
And so he sent, he sent a hundred
sats and in my strike wallet, which was
the 2% split, I received two sats.
So that's good.
Yeah.
So that worked and I couldn't believe it.
Honestly, I'm like, what actually came through.
So on a hundred sat transaction.
And so I'm just going to presume that
one sat would have come through, would have
come through as well.
Yeah.
If you're getting two, you're getting one.
I think so.
Yeah.
Cause you're probably zero base fee through the
whole chain at that point.
Yeah.
Well, and, and also a distinction for people
who don't understand the difference, like the difference
when Keysend and bolt 11 is Keysend is
generating a pre-image on the sender side.
So one of the benefits of having the
recipient having the receipt, the receiver generate the
pre-image is you actually get routing hints
with that pre-image creation on the same.
So the, if you say, okay, I want
to pay you and your wallet generates a
pre-image and sent, you know, and sends
it back.
Then what you're getting is routing hints all
the way.
So you have a more, a fit, like
you're more likely to get a payment to
be good, to go through successfully with a
bolt 11 generated invoice.
Then you are with a Keysend where it's
because Keysend is just has to depend on
its own a current graph where it's not
getting any help from the network.
Um, so that that's another benefit of going
with bolt 11.
Um, I, I just fit like we Keysend,
you know, the historically Keysend, we, we chose
that because I believe and correct me if
I'm wrong, I don't think LNURLP even existed
when we, in August of 2020, or if
it did, it was very, it was very
new and I don't think anybody supported it
yet.
I think Keysend was the only way.
Yeah, no, I know for sure because you
had, you could not just request an invoice
that, that was, that was the, I remember
it quite clearly.
Um, because, Oh, we, we can't have someone
approving invoices or, you know, doing that the
whole time.
So it had to be an automatic process.
And, uh, so I don't think it, if,
if it existed, we didn't even know about
it.
Right.
It was very young or brand new or
something like that.
And there was no support for it.
So that it may, Keysend was really the
only option at the time.
And, you know, but, but now that we
have now, like you said, Oscar, now that
we have a mature Bolt 11, uh, sort
of LNURLP spec, even though I still don't
like the receiver having to generate an invoice.
I mean, it's just, it's just where we're
at because lights like the way this is
being done on the financial institution level is
through a thing called RTP, which means real
-time payments.
And what, what groups like LightSpark are doing
is they're layering lightning on top of RTP
so that, uh, RTP, so that traditional banking
institutions can participate in lightning transactions, but underneath
it's, it's the language they speak, which is
RTP.
So LightSpark puts sort of puts a layer
on top of RTP to do that.
Um, and so it, it sounds, it may
sound stupid or, or like, um, not, I
don't know.
It may sound sketchy to say, oh, well,
traditional banks are starting to support lightning.
But it's not that they're supporting lightning natively.
They're supporting RTP and using a third party
like LightSpark to make that transaction happen.
And that's something that is, that is actually
getting a lot of traction.
And if the UM, if the LightSpark UMA
stuff turned, turns out to be solid, I
don't know how much you know about that,
Oscar, but if that stuff turns out to
be solid and reliable as it rolls out,
I mean, that really will open up all
the doors.
Yeah, exactly.
That's like, I would say one example of
how you could have, you know, with, with
KeySend in a time period of let's say
one to two years, I don't think you
would have, you know, major banks around the
world, you know, that people are already using
for their main accounts, integrating KeySend.
But with things like what LightSpark are doing,
you could see the major banks around the
world adopting, you know, and maybe they'll call
it the universal money address, but it will
still be interoperable with Lightning.
And then, you know, the homeboarding problem just
disappears completely, because it's just your bank account
that happens to be able to speak to
the Lightning Network.
So I think that's another example of how
that's the direction everything's going in.
The I think one of the things that
was confusing for people who just aren't that
completely into the Lightning Network part was this
additional LN address.
And maybe you can just give us a
little rundown.
What exactly is the difference between LN URL
pay, the LN address format?
Is it the same thing?
You know, just so people can get an
understanding, because the LN address came up half
a year ago, as an abstraction layer that
Fountain and Albi wanted, in order to have
people keep the same payment information in their
feeds, but the infrastructure providers, such as Albi
and Fountain to be able to change their
nodes or whatever they needed to do.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's a great point.
And this is kind of an example of,
you know, another thing that's happening that is
not necessarily linked to what we've just been
talking about.
But yeah, historically, the reason that, you know,
ourselves and Albi wanted to make this change
is so that we don't have to put
actual Lightning node pubkeys in the RSS feeds,
because we've had situations where we've had to
move the actual Lightning nodes, and we've had
to go out and try and find all
of the RSS feeds that still have the
old node in it and contact the podcasters
and ask them to change it.
And it's just like, yeah, it's very difficult.
And the chances of you having to change
the node pubkey in the future are quite
high.
So, to answer your question specifically, though, the
difference between the LN URL pay spec, which
is what every single Lightning address supports, and
this newer LN address options spec.
And really, it's just a different lookup URL.
So, the regular LN URL pay lookup just
works in a way where you give a
Lightning address and you receive back an invoice,
a Bolt11 invoice.
The options lookup was just a way for
us to keep supporting keysend, but kind of
give the option of paying a Bolt11 invoice
as well.
It is important to say that the options
lookup spec, even though both Fountain and Albi
support it, is not part of the official
LN URL spec.
It's just something that, you know, Fountain, Albi,
and, you know, Roy from Breeze was in
the GitHub discussion.
It's just something that we came up with.
So, I also think it's important to say
that, you know, that's like a separate piece.
And you'll see if you look at the
demo code that I've put together, there's some
code in there that says, like, does this
Lightning address support the options lookup?
And currently, the Lightning address providers that support
it are Fountain and Albi.
So, you'll see in the code, if you
look at it, if it's a Strike Lightning
address, we're not actually using that options lookup.
We're just using regular LN URL pay lookup,
because we know Strike don't support keysend anyway.
And, you know, we're just going to look
up the Bolt11 invoice.
Now, my hope is that we can actually
get the options lookup as part of the
official spec, because I also think it's helpful
for when Bolt12 comes along that you don't
have to, like, change the way you do
the lookup.
But that may or may not happen.
And so, I think that for, you know,
all the app developers listening, you will have
to do this check where you say, okay,
is it, you know, who's the Lightning address
provider?
And do they support the options lookup?
But again, if you look at the demo
code, it's really simple to do.
And, you know, the lookups are only kind
of like one path parameter difference.
So, they're very similar.
Well, and you could also just sort of
do it a different way where you try
the URL for the options URL first and
then fall back to the LN URLP URL
second without even having to have a lookup
table.
Yeah.
And the, I also think that the options
lookup is a great idea.
And I think that's why Roy, I think
Roy, I think Roy really pushed that concept
because then you're, you're sort of future proofing
the LN URLP lookup itself, because even beyond
Bolt12, there could be something else that happens
in the future.
So, you don't want to tie anything to
just one particular, you know, lookup.
Yeah.
The, so the, the, the way, just, just
to lay out the way this works is
you, you do the, when you, when you
have an LN address in the, in the
value block split, you do the lookup and
looking up that options URL that comes back
with potentially three options, keysend, LN URLP, Bolt11,
and Bolt12.
You, you take whichever one that you support
and you pay it, preference being Bolt11 at
this point.
Then you attempt to pay that, you know,
then you do the, you know, then you
attempt to pay that invoice.
Then, you know, you can fall back to
keysend if you, you know, if you need
to, then if that options lookup doesn't work,
you fall back and just do a straight
LN URLP lookup.
So, that would be your sort of payment
flow there.
You know, this, it's just not, there's no
way around this.
Stuff's going to break over the, across the,
you know, across the system.
Now, one of the things that Boomi got
upset about was where, you know, he was
saying that was FUD, was that we were
saying that everything's going to, that, that all
the listener, Albi listener wallets are going to
stop working on January 26th.
And the listener stuff, not, if you moved
to Albi Hub, you're not going to see
anything different.
You're just going to keep on trucking.
Let me make that clear.
But most, I mean, the overwhelming majority of
people are not on Albi Hub as far
as listeners go.
Now, you know, listener wallets.
Now, I would be shocked if 1%
or more of Castamatic listeners, listeners, are on
an Albi Hub.
They're almost all going to be on a
custodial wallet.
And they're all just going to, it's just
going to stop.
It's just going to stop working.
And that's just the reality of where we're
at.
So, in that, in that situation, a lot
of stuff's going to break.
Now, the, the, the podcaster side is going
to be less, the podcaster side is going
to be less affected by that, but it
is going to be a big, a big
deal.
And, you know, I don't even know if
the index API, you know, I need to
check that.
I don't even know if the index API.
We all, you know, we have a, we
have, we have a lot of, we have
a lot of podcast feeds that were shimmed.
Right.
The podcaster wallet.
Yeah.
And the, and the partner API, which, which
I think Oscar, you guys use that frequently
for people claiming their, claiming their, their feed
on Fountain.
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
We, we have a lot of podcasters who
have, you know, set up value through that
mechanism.
Okay.
No, I'm sorry.
Chad F said this sunset date is January
4th, not the 25th.
The 4th.
I don't know.
I thought it was the 25th.
We just lost two weeks.
Oh no.
Oh, Eric PP says index API does return
LN address.
Okay.
All right.
I thought it was generic enough to take
it, but it's good to see that that's
true.
Thanks, Eric.
So are you, are you pushing LN address
value blocks into the API now?
In the index?
No.
So, no.
So, you know, this, because of how big
a change this is, I wanted to make
sure that like we didn't break anything in
any other apps.
That's why the only RSS feed that I'm
aware of that actually has an LN address
value block type is the Fountain Radio RSS
feed.
So this is, you know, I think it
was last time I was on, actually, we
talked about Fountain Radio, but we've rebuilt it
now using an HLS stream and it's on
an RSS feed.
So you can listen to Fountain Radio in
any of the podcasting 2.0 apps.
And it looks, it looks really cool, actually,
especially the ones that support video because we
support video on it.
But, but yeah, so the Fountain Radio RSS
feed has the LN address type value blocks.
So if you're listening to Fountain Radio live
in Podverse or Podcast Guru, the support payments
won't work.
That's why we wanted to put that test
feed out there to give developers a chance
to add that payment option.
And we don't support the LN address type
in Fountain either.
So we need to do this as well.
And it was a, you know, a test
case for us as well.
But my hope is that, you know, that
feed can be a test case.
And if others can create test feeds as
well, that would be great.
And then we can try and like get
as many of the apps as possible to
at least have the option of paying those
types and, you know, work out all of
the rest of it in terms of like
the metadata, which is, you know, something that's
important as well.
And, and then, yeah, at least we have
a test feed to go and play with
that no one has listened to up until
this point, because it didn't exist until, you
know, last week.
Well, the, so, yeah, I'm checking in the
RPP is right.
The index does return the correct.
It's ingesting LN address splits correctly.
So that's good.
I mean, what, what is your, what is
your plan for what you're going to win,
how you're going to transition this in Fountain?
Yeah, so for the Fountain mobile app, I
think what we'll do is just support both.
So whenever somebody, you know, sends a payment,
we check the value block.
And if it's a keysend value block, we'll,
you know, send the keysend payment.
And if it's the newer LN address type
value block, we will, you know, pay via
Bolt 11.
And that should be relatively easy.
And then as, you know, more people switch
over on the hosting side, we can, you
know, look to deprecate the keysend.
Before we get deeper into the transition, we're
transitioning.
The important piece that is still on the
agenda is the payment information.
Um, cause you're right.
Uh, because even in our simple test with
Eric PP boosting me, uh, I got almost,
almost got all the Jason, but I didn't
because if you look at the strike, uh,
strike limits it to 200 characters.
So there wasn't, you know, the, what the
only message was test and it still cut
off everything.
So, um, that's been, I think the final
piece is, and it's always, it's always been
a huge benefit on one hand, I feel
to have the payment information, uh, being shot
along as in the TLV record.
On the other hand, uh, there were limitations
to it.
Um, it was kind of a kludge if
I recall correctly.
So now we, we are looking at doing
something different there.
I think we need to spend a few
minutes on that.
Yes, definitely.
So, you know, from my perspective, I think
that decoupling the payment from the metadata just
has so many benefits.
Um, and again, it's kind of a separate
thing to everything that we've talked about, uh,
so far, like even if we were to
carry on with key send, I still think
it would be an amazing idea to separate
the metadata from the payment because unlike if
it just like take a step back and
think about the different things that we've done
over the past couple of years, you know,
making the boost public in the fountain app,
uh, and displaying them under the episodes and
putting them in the activity feed is something
that both listeners and podcasters really, really enjoy.
Um, you know, for listeners, it's great because
you can see what podcasts the people you
follow are finding valuable.
And then for podcasters, it's great because when
people send a boost, it provides them with
discovery as well as value.
Um, and so people have loved that.
And you know, I think we've always wanted
to have this cross out, you know, commenting
ability and fountain has always wanted to pull
the boost in from the other apps.
And we've actually tried doing this before, but
the data in the TLVs is just too
unreliable because we only see the one portion
of the split.
So, you know, I also think that going
forward, you know, just separating the payment from
the metadata and kind of rethinking all of
that, it opens up a world of possibilities
in terms of what we can do with
these payments and what we can do with
the data, because, you know, we've never really
had it happen, but the only thing that
tells you that this payment was sent from
an app is a string in the TLV,
which anyone can fake.
So, you know, you could easily send, you
know, a payment to one of the splits
in the, in the feed saying that the
value M sat total was a million sats.
And then you'd have questions, you know, where's
the rest of the money?
Exactly.
So, but like, I think it would be
absolutely incredible for podcasting 2.0, if we
could figure out a way to reliably share
the payment metadata with between all of the
apps.
And I also think it paves a way
for cross app comments.
And I think we should get to cross
app comments because, you know, I think it's
possible.
I really do think it is.
But anyway, on the payment metadata.
So I'll just explain the idea that I
have for this.
And, you know, I've talked to a couple
of the guys in, in the podcasting 2
.0 dot social.
And like, we've spoken about this.
So I've like been getting feedback on this.
And I think it's a good idea.
But I also want to say that, like,
I'm open to other ideas as well.
And whatever people want to do, happy to
go with it.
So my idea is to use Nosta to
transmit the payment data.
And before you think, oh, no, not Nosta.
This is not about the social aspect of
Nosta.
There's no profiles involved.
There's none of that.
You don't need a Nosta account to use
this.
It's just about using the signing capability of
Nosta to allow apps to share the payments
with each other.
So as Fountain, we can sign a message
with our private key, send that out to
everybody else.
And people can kind of trust that based
on the reputation of Fountain.
You know, Fountain will trust the podverse pub
key, the podcast guru pub key, the true
fans pub key.
So I think, you know, Nosta is just
a public message bus.
And we can put the metadata about these
payments in Nosta events.
We can broadcast them, anyone can query them,
and we can trust them because we trust
the apps based on the reputation.
And also, you know, Nosta is great for
this scenario in that it is actually changeable,
like we have the ability to, to, you
know, create what we want, rather than having
to like fudge our way into some existing
system.
So I've come up with a structure for
this.
And I've just called it the Nosta generic
payment event.
And you can go and look at an
example of this on the on the on
the demo website, if you send a payment
on a demo website, it will generate one
of these and you can see all of
the details that our relay is also accepting
these events.
So you can query our relay for them.
And in this payment event, you have all
of the metadata about the payment, you have
all the podcast goods and the information about
the podcast, so you can figure out, you
know, what actually was getting paid.
So that's the idea for how to share
the payment metadata.
And then the second part of this is,
if we're using bolt 11, and we only
have 200 characters of space, you know, what
do we do, because a lot of people
want to send, you know, 500 character plus
boost, you know, that's already a limitation of
the key send TLV, because we can't go
higher than that.
So, so the other part of this, and
again, the reason why I think NOS is
a great solution is because it just has
these amazing primitives, these amazing like building blocks.
So one of them is called NIT19 encoded
values.
And this actually uses the same TLV encoding
as the key send TLVs.
What it does is allow you to take
essentially the key information about one of these
payment events and encode it as a short
string.
So again, this is available on the demo
site.
And you can see that when you send
a payment, the encoded string is created, and
it's put into the bolt 11 memo, and
there's enough space for it.
And inside that encoded string, you have all
of the information you need to find that
event.
So you have the unique ID of the
event.
You also have the pub key who published
it.
So you can say straight away, okay, this
is from fountain, I'm going to fetch the
event because I trust the fountain pub key.
I've never seen this pub key before, I'm
not even going to bother fetching it or
showing it.
And then you also have the relay where
that event is located.
So you just that one short string.
Yeah, the relay.
That's good.
From helipads from whatever app you're on, all
you need is that string, which fits in
a bolt 11 invoice, and then you can
pull back the entire payment metadata.
So I think this is a really good
solution.
And what you'd actually see, and we've got
this hooked up to the strike wallet.
So you know, if someone sends a payment
now on the demo site, what I will
see in my strike wallet is I'll just
see the header podcasting 2.0 payment, and
then there'll be a link to this pod
bay.org slash p slash the n address
one.
Now the really important thing to understand about
this is anyone can create these links, it
doesn't have to be like this domain that
I've set up as a test, we could
put this on podcast index, each app could
have their own version of it like it
because all that really matters is the n
address.
And that tells you like how to find
the event.
And that's a way that we can kind
of highlight to Okay, I have a strike
lightning address.
And I see all these payments coming.
And I'm like, what are these payments, I'll
just be able to click on the link
from my strike wallet, it will take me
out to the page where it will show
me all the information about the payment.
Obviously, at the moment on the demo site,
it's just you know, the JSON just to
highlight how it works.
But you can imagine in the future, you
know, that's a bit more styled, it's got
the information about like which app it came
from all of that information.
So yeah, that's, that's my view on how
we should do this, we should share these
signed payment events between the apps, we can
trust each other based on reputation.
And then for the memo field of the
bolt 11 invoice, we can put these, you
know, encoded links into the memo field, which
can link out to the full payment details,
philosophical issue, which came up over this.
Up until now, the only people who could
receive and see the messages would be the
people who are in the value block split,
which I've always countered by saying, well, it
seems like fountain is showing all of these
that are coming from fountain, I personally have
found I've talked about before, I found that
nice, I liked it.
And it can people can then comment and
do other things with it.
But in general, that's always been private.
And so that always comes up as well.
Hold on a second.
Now everybody, for some, although it was never
really intended that way.
The payment information, the the message that was
sent along with the payment was semi private,
because you know, only if you receive the
payment, would you see it?
So the philosophical question is, is there an
issue in general amongst the community of this
being now open?
I personally like it, because then people can
start to build new applications, new thoughts, new
ideas, based upon this of things we haven't
thought up yet, some things we can already
think up.
Where do we stand with that just as
a as a group?
Yeah, so I think, again, what's great about
Nosta is we have these building blocks.
And, for example, there's another Nosta NIP that
allows you to do this thing called gift
wrap, which allows you to basically encrypt the
event.
So, you know, I think, we don't want
to overcomplicate this, this potential change if it
does go in this direction.
But there is definitely ways that you could
create one of those like payment links that
is only readable by the receiver, because you
would encrypt it.
And then only the receiver with the receiving
kind of key could actually, you know, unwrap
it and view the metadata.
So there's definitely ways that if people want
to, they can, you know, create a different
version of one of these encoded payment events,
and have it only readable by the person
that received that link, as opposed to it
being, you know, publicly accessible by everyone.
And that's actually, you know, better than what
we currently have.
Because again, you know, if the splits are,
you know, open by the TLV, then you
can always kind of read it if you're
in the splits.
But I also want to back up a
little bit to your description of the payment
proof because, you know, you, so what, let
me just kind of rephrase or reframe the
process here.
The payment happens, the splits get paid.
And let's say that there's three splits, they
each have a Bolt 11 invoice that gets
paid.
There's a payment proof, which is going to
be a signed event that is created by
the sending app and gets put on, in
this case, on Nostra Relay as an event.
And then a link to that event, a
public link to that event is included as
a URL in the memo field of the
Bolt 11 invoice when it gets paid.
And then, like, as of right now, you
can just click that invoice and just to
display the JSON of that.
So that all feels good, except the, not
except, I mean, but in addition, I guess
I would say that you, this is all
up to the sending app.
So the sending app can do whatever it
wants with this payment proof.
So the payment proof, you are signing a
Nostra event and then sticking it, like for
fountains, for this example demo app, I'm assuming
you're putting this on the fountain relay.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Okay.
And so then, but if you're a different
app that doesn't have like a Nostra infrastructure
or whatever, you could send this in some
other forum.
I mean, you don't have to stick this
on that.
You could put it out there as an
activity pub event or whatever, as long as
it's somewhere accessible to the end user and
it follows this format.
It's just JSON.
So you could, you know, you could parse
this no matter where it's at.
You could just put these as, as HTML
input.
I mean, HTML outputs, like, no, I'm sorry.
I'm losing my mind.
Not HTML, like HTTP accessible events.
They could just go on as just JSON
documents on an object storage somewhere.
Yeah, exactly.
The creation and signing of these payment receipts
that the apps sign and the distribution of
them are kind of separate.
You don't have to broadcast them to the
Nostra network.
You could just, you know, have them, you
know, be in one particular place or you
could have them sent around privately if you
wanted to.
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think, should that be
in the spec though?
I mean, I guess what I'm asking is,
should it be in the spec somewhere that,
okay, the payment proof needs to be, if
it's going to be a publicly accessible payment
proof, it needs to be in the Bolt
11 memo field.
I don't know that that's spelled out in
the spec anywhere.
You're doing it, but I don't know that
it's actually in the spec as written.
None of this is in the spec.
So, yeah, I guess, like, this is just
an idea.
And, you know, I've spoken to a few
of the guys on this and got good
feedback from it.
So, this is very much me saying, like,
here's how I think it could work.
And people can play around with it.
The code's open source.
You know, the demo's there.
People can play around with it, you know,
and we can keep discussing it.
And this doesn't have to be the final
thing that we end on.
It's just kind of an idea.
But I think, I mean, I think it
kind of is the final thing that we
end on because you, I don't think that
there is any other way or any other
place to put it.
I mean, like, you're just putting the URL
in there to the payment proof.
And it could be that you put something
else.
It could be that you put some other
type of link in there to the payment
proof.
But having the payment proof linked to in
the payment itself.
Yeah, that's the way.
Yeah, I don't see any other way to
do it.
Yeah.
And the cool thing about this is, is
it's not just a replacement for what we
have, but we get more information because you're
seeing, like, the one step above, like the,
you know, you're not just seeing your split,
you're seeing the whole thing.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So you're, you, what you're just, what you
just said was that when you see the
payment proof being linked to is the payment
proof for the sort of payment writ large,
it's not for that particular split necessarily.
Yeah.
And that preserves the sort of the integrity
of the numerology and all of that.
Yes, yes, exactly.
Because this is exactly right.
Because the problem that we were having before,
and we had to remove this feature because
this was happening was what we would receive
a split.
We would receive a payment to our boost
bot at fountain.fm split, which was like
a 1%.
Because we said, okay, put us in the
splits and we'll create the boost and display
them from other apps as well.
And then we would have these, you know,
big boosts come in from other apps, but
one of the other splits would have failed.
And so we would display, we would be
displaying a 200,000 sat boost, but actually
the main split failed.
And so that podcaster didn't get any money.
And then we would be like, that would
be going into our chart system.
And so it just wasn't reliable.
But what's really cool about these events as
well, exactly.
What's really cool about these events as well
is they're replaceable events.
So, you know, I won't get into how
they work on Nosta, but they're really simple.
Essentially you can publish new versions of the
event and that address link that goes in
the memo field that doesn't change.
It's just the actual event that changes and
the D tag, which is the unique ID
for the payment that stays the same.
And so what this means is as soon
as someone sends a boost in the app,
you can generate one of these, you can
send it out there.
But then if, you know, a bit further
down the line, you have a payment error
on one of the splits, you can publish
a new version of this event to say
that actually, no, like the amount wasn't that
much, it was a lower amount.
So it also gives you that flexibility to
be able to, you know, handle payment errors
and, you know, like changes to the payment.
Let me rephrase again what you just said
for, let me translate it into human.
So what you're saying, what you're saying is
that, let's say I have a split, a
three-way, let's say I have a value
block with three splits in it.
And the share is, you know, 33, 33,
33.
Then a hundred set boost goes out and
each recipient is going to get 33 sets.
And initially the event may go out now,
whether it's going out to Nostra or just
being published in some other way as a
static file.
The initial payment proof is going to reflect
a 99 set boost and, or, you know,
whatever, however you calculate that is going to
reflect 99.
Then if one of the splits failed, you
could go back and revise that to, okay,
wait, no, the total was 66 instead.
And that payment proof comes back.
The payment proof gets changed after the fact
to reflect reality instead of what we thought
happened.
Exactly.
Okay.
All right.
Yeah.
No, I mean, this, this all makes, this
all makes sense.
I mean, this all just, this all makes
a lot of sense.
And of course, and then you have this
idea, well, then you have the idea also
that the, okay, well, let me, let me
say one more thing.
So the, if you can't, you know, we're
describing a thing that I'm looking at on
the screen right now, a JSON structure that
is the payment proof.
We're just, we're, I'm describing this thing that
I'm looking at, but if you can't see
it, it's a JSON structure that has a
lot of the payment information in it.
But then there's also one section of this
structure that is a metadata section.
And that is where the traditional, what we've
been using before the TLV, what we've always
said is, you know, we just refer to
it as the quote TLV record, which has
like the action equals boost, which the podcast
index ID, the feed URL, episode ID, all
these different episode, all these different pieces of
metadata about the podcast being, being boosted, all
that stuff goes into this, into this field
in this event called metadata.
So all that stuff can go, all that
stuff is preserved, but you're going to have
to have access to the payment proof to
see it.
And then if you don't have the payment
proof, if it's not provided in the memo,
well, then you just, you're not going to,
you're just going to assume that you're going
to assume that the sender can't, has no
way of proving that you can, you still,
you still don't know how many stats you
got, but you can't include that payment in
some sort of like a public thing, or
you, you can't, it's not, that payment has
told you by the absence of its payment
proof record that it has either, that it's
either fake or that it just does simply
doesn't have a way to prove itself.
Like it doesn't have a publicly accessible system
that it's hooked into to provide the payment
proof.
So, I mean, this all just makes sense
to me.
Yeah.
And the cool thing is as well, is
there's two additional things about the way that
this is structured.
The first is because the way NOSTA works,
you can query on the single letter tags.
And so the GUIDs are actually not in
the metadata, they're in their own tags in
the I tag.
And that way you can query all the
payments for a specific feed, a specific item,
which applies to episodes and tracks or a
publisher as well.
So that means that, you know, for one
app to say, give me all the payments
for this episode in the last 30 days,
it's literally one WebSocket query, and it's really
easy.
And then the metadata is because it's just
like a JSON encoded thing is extensible.
So, you know, if in two years, something,
you know, there's some additional metadata that we
want to put in there that would make
this all much more useful, all of this
data, then we can just update that metadata.
We should probably put a link to this
payment proof in.
Yeah, it's in the show notes.
In the show notes.
Yeah, I got it in already.
Okay, cool.
So how do we transition?
What is the best way?
I mean, I heard Oscar say that, you
know, they'll, they'll look at Ellen, because, you
know, I currently don't really have an easy
way to create an Ellen address.
But I do have a strike wallet.
You know, so is it do we just
rip the bandaid off and go full bore?
Or I mean, I'm the transition part is
a little fuzzy to me still.
I think that I think we shouldn't rip
the bandaid off immediately, because I think that
there's still like, we can use some test
feeds, like the fountain radio feed, you know,
if anyone else wants to create a test
feed with the new Ellen address, and just
give everyone, you know, a week or so
to just get their head around this, play
around with it, send some test payments, have
different combinations of splits, and just kind of
make sure that's all working.
And then maybe we can try and like,
you know, because well, I'll give you a
great example, like all of the podcasters that
use fountain to receive, you know, we'll have
a decision to make on when to update
all of those value blocks.
And I definitely wouldn't want to do that
until, you know, I've at least heard back
from, you know, everyone, all the app developers
on, you know, what they think of this,
and whether they're playing around with it, or
I think we should give it at least
a few weeks of people just having time
to look through the code that I've produced,
look through the page with all of the
demo data.
And like, basically what we've talked about today,
but in text form, and we can kind
of just continue the conversation on podcast index
dot social to make sure we haven't missed
anything.
And, and the, the somebody, you know, somebody
really could create a key sent to bolt
11 gateway.
You know what I mean?
I mean, that would be like the, you
know, that would be something that Brian of
London would probably attempt to do since it's
very Rube Goldberg, but it could, it could
be done.
It could be done.
That's funny.
Yeah.
Wow.
Okay.
I feel like for the first time in
two years, I need a cigarette.
That's a, that's a lot.
Yeah.
There's a lot there, but, but I feel
like, well, you said, you know, when do
we rip the bandaid off?
I mean, on January 5th, there is no,
there is no, there is no more bandaid.
Yeah.
The bandaid is gone.
Right.
Exactly.
What if I told you there was no
bandaid?
I mean, that's really what kind of where
we're at.
So this is where here, my feeling is
we're at the perfect time to break stuff
because the things, the people who, the people
who are in a position where, and that
would be like you, Oscar, Sam, the people
who are in a position to be affected
the most, I'll be as well to people
who are in a position to be the
affected the most financially by a bandaid, a
bandaid rip are the people who also happen
to be the most equipped to handle these
changes.
True.
So, you know, I mean, found on, on
fountain, you control, you control the, the listener
side and the, and most of the podcaster
side saying, you know, Sam is, has sort
of like wrapped his infrastructure with, with the,
with his own sort of payment paradigm.
I'll be also controls so much of their
own infrastructure.
So I think the bandaid rip is really
going to be, it's, it's less of a
bandaid rip and more of like a, you
know, the bandaid is just going to get
old one day and shrivel up and fall
off.
The analogies are awesome, Dave.
Really good.
Yeah.
I mean, do you agree with that Oscar?
Yeah, definitely.
And I think the other thing is like,
if, you know, I, I know with Albie
making this change, you know, this kind of
like, you have to think about what you're
going to do, you know, from having one,
um, set of APIs with Albie, you might
now have to have two, like one with
strike off and the other with Albie for
the people that want to continue using Albie
hub.
But like the cool thing about this is
Albie, all of their APIs, as Boomi said,
still work for people that have Albie hubs.
So you don't really need to remove the
Albie, um, piece of this.
You just can pay these bolt 11 invoices
with the Albie API.
So, you know, you can almost like start
testing this without implementing strike.
Oh, so you can just use the Albie
APIs to try paying one of these LN
address types value blocks, which we have one
example in the fountain radio feed.
So I think that's really important as well
to like, and, you know, I've been speaking
to the Albie guys, you know, I think
they, they understand where I'm coming from with
this and hopefully we can get them, um,
you know, on board with pushing this change.
Cause also it gives people the opportunity to
revisit the payments in their app and also
look at things like NOS, the wallet connect
as well, which I know, you know, Albie
would like more people to, to integrate.
So I think getting Albie on board and
just framing this as, you know, this is
a great solution for the future for, for
Albie, for bouncing, for all of the apps
and, and it shouldn't be that difficult if,
if we can get everyone on board, then
we can think about at some point, you
know, maybe like early next year, making the
switch.
Yeah.
Because that's important that yet again, another sort
of disconnected yet timing wise simultaneous thing that
is happening is, you know, it's not like,
it's not like what we're saying is, Hey,
Albie listener, Albie custodial listener wallets are going
to be sunset on January the 5th.
Um, everybody switched to strike.
That's not, nobody's saying that it's just that
strike is strike ended up being, uh, a
good example of a way that a independent
podcast app could connect to an existing wallet
and begin to use that infrastructure.
Like, like Franco with Castamatic, I mean, a
strike's not available in Italy.
He can't use it.
So like, he can't even test, I mean,
he could put, he could put in place,
he could put in place the, the connectors
for people outside of Italy that could, so
that they could use it, but like, he
can't even test it in his own country.
So we're not, that's not really the purpose
of what we're talking about is, Hey, everybody
start using strike.
The point is, um, not everybody start using
strike, but everybody starts supporting bolt 11 so
that you can then have access to a
wider array of payment of a wallet providers
as they come online.
Exactly.
As they come in your area existing.
Um, just so I get this straight existing
Albie users who, um, and I'm talking on
the podcast listening side who have, uh, who
have a custodial wallet that's going to go
away.
Now, can Albie just switch that for them
and say, Oh, um, your same Albie credentials
work.
Uh, but now you have to use our
Nostra wallet connects and you bring your own
wallet.
Does that work?
I don't know.
I mean, it should.
Yeah.
Because they support Nostra wallet connect.
I mean, it should.
Well, okay.
Yeah.
So that's a, that's an example where like,
you know, if that, if Albie could do
that, then that would be, that would also
really help with the transition because, you know,
for, for examples like Italy, the other example
is Zebedee as well.
I know they've been talking about, you know,
opening up the OAuth capability as well.
So that would be a great, another option.
And then, yeah, if Albie could allow you
to sign up with a wallet, connect it
to Albie via Nostra wallet connect, and then
use the Albie APIs kind of like, so
there's like three hops for the user through
Albie to the other wallet.
Like that doesn't, obviously that doesn't solve the
onboarding thing that we've talked about, but that
may solve it for existing Albie users that
just want to kind of like.
Just continue using it.
Yes.
So that could be a solution for Franco.
I mean, he would still have to have
his users select a different wallet, a wallet
provider, but they, they wouldn't even necessarily have
to change anything in their, in their app.
They could use the existing Albie, Albie API.
Yeah.
And Eric PP said, I think you can
connect Koinos to an Albie account.
So that would be another option.
Yeah.
I don't, I just, I don't want, I
hate that the Albie guys thought we were
fudding them and throwing them under the bus.
That's just not the case.
We're just trying to be realistic and, you
know, never let a good crisis go to
waste.
And this is the, this is the way
that you, this is the right time to
do uncomfortable kind of things that break stuff
and get messy.
So let's, let's just like, like, let's just
go through this and, and get it done.
And we'll come out on the other side
with something that's better for them and everybody
else too.
I love it.
Yeah.
I love it.
Where, where are we at?
Oh, we're an hour and a half.
Do you want to leave it here?
Have we, have we discussed everything we need
to?
I mean, there's plenty more stuff we could
talk about, but that can be for the
next board meeting.
Yeah.
I think this is probably as much as
we can digest at the moment.
And yeah, I mean, Oscar, man, I, I,
I so much appreciate you doing this pod
pay example thing.
This is so helpful, man.
This is so helpful.
I can't thank you enough for doing this
because this gives all the developers instantly an
ability to just look and see what this
code looks like.
I mean, like, thank you.
Yeah.
It's really, I mean, yeah, sorry.
It took so long, but like, yeah, I
mean, happy to help because I really do
believe that all of this, you know, it
just doesn't work if it only happens in
one app, because you might as well just
go and use Spotify and have like Spotify's
internal payment system.
It works because it creates payments.
It creates cool social features, but you can
still choose to use any podcast app, depending
on, you know, the design or the feature
set or, you know, whatever.
So I think it's really important that the
payments work in an open way going forward.
And I hope that yeah, we can just,
I mean, I still would love it at
some point.
I think it, it would just be so
cool if someone could send a boost on
like Dave, if you could send a boost
on Castamatic and I could see that on
the episode page and fountain and reply to
you saying, Oh, cool.
I'll check this episode out.
Add to my queue.
Like that one day, maybe one day would
be an incredible, incredible thing.
And Spotify and Apple are just never going
to be able to do that.
So I just hope they never want, they
don't want to, they don't know.
It's not in their best interest.
Yeah.
So I hope we can get there one
day and hopefully this like sharing of the
metadata is like the first step and yeah,
it's going to be, it is a change,
but yeah, if any, like just please reach
out to me, take a look at the
demo code and we don't have to do
it exactly in this way.
Like this can hopefully be the start of
the conversation and we can arrive at something
that works for everyone.
And if anyone wants to test it's a
fountain radio, what's the URL for that?
Yeah.
So it's fountain.fm slash radio, and you
can also listen in the mobile app.
So yeah, check out, Ainsley is actually doing
a live takeover now.
Oh nice.
We have the ability for artists to take
over.
So yeah, jump over to fountain radio and
also, yeah, like app developers use the fountain
radio feed because yeah, it's just a live
item.
It works in the same way as a
regular live item.
But obviously the value block is in this
new format.
So yeah, use fountain radio as your test
feed and hopefully you'll discover some good tunes
whilst you're working away.
Excellent.
And I'm going to leave my strike split
in the podcasting 2.0 feed if anyone
wants to hit that and I can provide
instant feedback as well.
Okay.
I suggest we forego the value for value
thanks here and move that towards the next
show, if that's okay with you, Dave?
Oh yeah, sure.
That's fine.
Well, you had an hour and a half.
You've got your family.
I don't want you rushing.
I'm falling down.
I haven't had breakfast.
And the donuts suck today in the boardroom.
I'm really sorry.
I'll get a different provider.
Is there a cake type?
It's not my favorite.
Yeah, not my favorite.
And the scones that Oscar brought, you know,
I ate all of those in a minute.
You know, it's done.
Oscar brother, thank you so much.
Thank you for jumping on this.
We really appreciate it.
And I'm so grateful that you see that
we need the whole, you know, the whole
grouping on this.
We need to build, you know, a whole
force and an army and it's not just
fountain.
That really says a lot about you, my
brother.
It really does.
Well, yeah.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate everything you do.
And yeah, looking forward to working through all
of this.
So yeah, thanks so much for having me
on again.
All right.
Boardroom, thank you for those of you who
showed up so early.
Dave, brother, have a great Thanksgiving gathering with
the family.
And I'm sure they're looking forward to hearing
all about the board meeting.
They want to know every detail.
Yeah, we're going to get pretty deep into
payment peruse around the table today.
Thank you all very much for being here
in the boardroom.
We'll see you next Friday for Podcasting 2
.0. You
have been listening to Podcasting 2.0. Visit
podcastindex.org for more information.
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