Glad to hear it!

Our goal with it is to make it the reference client for publishing nostr and WebTorrent content.

I don't particularly care if Lightning.Video becomes a big discovery brand like YouTube, I think that's an unrealistic goal for a small tech-oriented team. What I would prefer to see is hundreds or even thousands of copies of Lightning.Video's stack, run by different communities or even individual creators on their own namespace.

With varied instances of LV speaking the same language of nostr and WebTorrent, we can take down YouTube's network effect one niche at a time- in a decentralized way that's immune to influence by advertising networks.

I should add that LV also runs on Lightning Pub, and that will be critical to making it non-custodial at enterprise scale. You'll soon be able to use your LV balance right from ShockWallet by clicking a link that adds it as a source node.

Now that we've gotten the video operations side largely figured out, we'll be focusing more on Nostrfication using a 2nd layer we're currently scoping (slightly more advanced relay technology for nostr https://GitHub.com/shocknet/SMART)

In the next few months, you should see content from the broader nostr network on Lightning.Video and will be able to publish to the network from LV Studio.

Using nostr as a transport simply hasn't be done yet for anything like this, and even the encrypted messaging NIP4 that's standard is broken, so we had to from-scratch implement a draft of NIP44

For the Pub protocol, it's actually designed as a typical REST interface for dual use, and we created a proto generator in-house to convert it to a nostr rpc (somewhat inspired by grpc)

There's a lot more we want to do with nostr in wallet/pub and on lightning.video that still needs better nostr tooling to have good UX, so we're in the design stage of a layer2 for that (slightly more advanced relay technology for nostr https://GitHub.com/shocknet/SMART)

Thank you, actually yes I think the Alby extension would benefit from Pub as an available back-end... Will be in touch.

Thank you!

We used an in-house protogen to make RPC that works either over Nostr encrypted messages or REST

Thank you!

Personally I've been dissatisfied with the state of Lightning wallets for a long time and I think now it's just a few bug fixes away from being my daily driver.

I started the original ShockWallet in 2018, was first one to have LNURL in it etc... but everyone else in Lightning was doing the same, so I pivoted the team to focus on Video infrastructure.

The original ShockWallet used a predecessor to Nostr (some of you might remember GUN). We intended it to be a decentralized WeChat kind of thing, and had been building Video support anyway. To sustain the project, we needed to narrow our focus and had leading technology in Video.

But since we got away from Wallet, the state of LN wallets hasn't improved, they have in many cases gotten worse by pivoting to node-on-phone. I think this has been a huge mistake, and it's been a headwind for the Video site.

I hope if nothing else this release starts to push the narrative back to remote nodes, shows that Lightning actually works and is fucking awesome, and that the concept of Nostr as an overlay network unlocks new UX possibilities.

The incentive structure around it too should hopefully onboard lots of new users, via their Uncle Jim, in a decentralized way.

I'm absolutely jacked to the NIPS that this release will usher in a Lightning renaissance.

Please if you do, report bugs and help us prioritize :)

Hope you enjoy!

I think on a relative basis there's no negative tradeoffs, at least not major ones. At the end of the day its still asymmetric cryptography and relays are commodity webservers.

The keys on either side are distinct from social nostr keys, so you could simply not publish your Pub or Wallet keys to the social graph if you wanted to use it in the dark.

We're also running a completely unmodified version of strfry, so anyone looking to shield their metadata could do the same with pretty much any webhost. Relays themselves are trust-less too because of the nip44 encryption and nostr signatures. It's an improvement over most alternatives like ngrok.

The fact that nostr is web-tech and uses SSL also helps it hide in plain sight on locked down networks like public WiFi.

Lastly, because its just 2 nostr keys exchanging encrypted messages amongst other nostr traffic, it's also not obvious that it's Lightning node comms. Since anything could go over nostr, unlike proprietary stuff like LNC.

ShockWallet and Pub are both clients, and yes the goal is that other apps will be able to use the library that powers both

Coming from an architecture background I think Bolt12 is badly designed and won't work at any meaningful scale, particularly if the network is to remain decentralized

Pub competes with Bolt12 in being an overlay network that can solve the same problems bolt12 sells itself on, and more

Web architecture that nostr is based on can scale better than onion messages, and for lightning to be the native money of the internet we need to use web-tech to get it into more apps