hikes > panels View quoted note →

Updated the StashPay website. I’m pivoting away from the freelancer focus and making a minimalist wallet for everyone. I’ve realized I care more about exploring peer-to-peer payments UX than building a B2B business. I’m also considering turning Onion Mill into a non-profit to get more people involved via grants. But for now I’ll continue to self-fund my work. I kinda like being an independent voice. https://stashpay.me

Very excited to see this PR merged:

GitHub

Remove mandatory API key checks by hydra-yse · Pull Request #639 · breez/breez-sdk-liquid

Closes #661. Built on top of #637. This PR: Makes the real-time sync service optional (depending on the presence of sync_service_url) as follows: ...

Thank you to Roy and the @Breez ⚡️ team for being open to feedback and enabling use of the SDK without an API-key again. Onwards ⚡️

There are no failures, only iterations. Keep going.

💯 living below your means and stacking sats is so much easier to implement for young people than trying to get on the housing ladder (or should say housing bag?) View quoted note →

I’ve been considering integrating Cashu or Fedimint to support <1000 sat payments in StashPay. But where I get stuck is that it would probably require displaying two balances. Not only do Liquid and Ecash have different trust/auditability properties. I’m not sure there is a good solution to managing dust amounts in both an ecash mint and a Liquid wallet. The resulting UX would likely be worse. A solution to integrate all of these into a single mobile app might be to integration each into a bluewallet card. Then allow users to do zaps with their ecash wallet that connects to a lightning address. Medium sized lightning payments (over 10k sats) could be done from their Liquid wallet to save on fees. Then an on-chain wallet could be used for savings. Blue already has many great options like multi-sig. All these wallets could be connected internally via submarine swaps to manage balances in each. View quoted note →

There is nothing inherently more decentralized about ecash mints over submarine swap servers. Both are fundamentally lightning nodes that can be run over tor by a community member. Ecash has better privacy but also requires trusting the community member(s) with custody. The swap server on the other hand delegates custody to a diverse set of options that users can chose based their desired trust trade-offs.

Discussing FATF isn’t as popular as CBDCs since your favorite onramps already all comply. But this interview of a nym who works on the rules is definitely worth a listen. It’s chilling and inspiring at the same time. View quoted note →

It’s so important to be able to disagree respectfully i.e. distinguish between an idea (on which we can disagree) and a person holding an idea (which we can respect despite a disagreement). Perhaps this could be a podcast format, where the moderator invites two people with opposing views and starts with the question of what each respects about the other person. After mutual respect has been established, the discussion is moved towards dissecting the opposing ideas. Other ground rules could be to encourage nonviolent communication practices from Marshall Rosenberg’s book. In his book Rosenberg describes how he has defused decades long conflicts using these practices. I try (and often fail) at using his techniques in various relationships. Perhaps the moderator could call out mistakes and encourage each guest to reword something they’ve said to reestablish mutual respect. At the end of the podcast the moderator could ask the two where they agree with the other person’s perspective and whether they have found a mistake in their own thinking. This gives an opportunity for growth and normalizes the practice of admitting mistakes. This format would probably diffuse so many of the conflicts lingering in society and allow us to get closer to a truth based in first principles thinking.

Love this discussion around building ethical for-profit services using non-custodial open source. And great to see podcasts with bootstrapped founders 🔥 View quoted note →

Happy Jan 3rd! StashPay 0.1.7 is here for iOS & Android. Download here: https://stashpay.me Release notes: * Add: Update NPM dependencies * Add: Switch RNG to a maintained module * Add: Reduce min on-chain amount to 25k sats * Add: Handle lightning: and bitcoin: URLs * Fix: Remove button margin in seed backup

Bullish on the UX becoming easier to get paid in bitcoin directly to your own wallet than buying and withdrawing. Sure, we can accept payment in fiat and buy into a lobster trap. But that’s on each of us to change. View quoted note →

Privacy must happen on the protocol level. This is why BOLT12 is important. This is why ECash is important. Any entity or service provider that becomes too big will become a pressure point. It doesn’t matter if it’s a major LSP, a large submarine swap server, a large custodian, or a large ECash mint. Regulatory pressure will act as a decentralization function and ultimately reduce pressure points to a local/community level. It is here on the local level where privacy has a chance. Services, protocols and products that plan ahead to give end users control to configure their own servers have a chance at staying resilient in the coming years.

Good read. I’d also recommend Luke Gromen’s analysis. He points out that a commodity based reserve asset would favor countries with a trade surplus. View quoted note →

StashPay 0.1.6 is here for iOS & Android. Download here: https://stashpay.me Release notes: * Add: Redesign home, send & receive screens * Add: Set receive amount before displaying invoice QR code * Add: Use Breez Liquid Electrum server for instant P2P payment notifications * Add: „BTC“ or „LN“ to receive copy button * Fix: text input alignment on Android