Hey Stackers! This is an exclusive AMA session. Discover the next wave of projects and builders in 2024.

Local development on bitcoin can be tricky. Tooling isn't the easiest. But most importantly figuring out the minimal scope for the product to be quick to ship to get market feedback.

Assessing custodial vs non-custodial tradeoffs

Choosing one area to focus has been hard, it is almost that midwit bell curve meme when you're trying to justify choosing one thing over another. Ultimately, we're trusting our collective guts, build the thing that excites us the most.

More wrt nostr, but content moderation. There is a tension between censorship resistance and safety (of various kinds). A lot of the content that shows up on the internet is objectionable or illegal. Objectionable content is relatively easy to deal with by using strict web-of-trust filters, but illegal content — especially CP — is very hard to detect, dangerous to handle, and presents a real danger to everyone exposed to it. There are screening techniques that exist, but rely on proprietary databases and hashing algorithms. Open-sourcing those components isn't an option because they're a form of compression, and so always possible to reverse-engineer by attackers. https://about.iftas.org/ is doing some good work in this space in the ActivityPub world.

Building Trust and Reputation. Both are critical for success in Bitcoin, and take time.

Bitcoin products need to be hyper aware of security and transparency.

We are building an app to help Bitcoiners calculate their caps gains / losses across all of their wallets. For me, getting the messaging/pricing right for the marketing site has been difficult. I am enjoying the process, just takes time. But looking forward to sharing something with Top Builder mentors for some input very soon.

Getting user engagement is the biggest hurdle imo. Any tips or help would be most appreciated.

as others have said, choosing what to build. i tend to approach this from a perspective of what not to build. e.g. asking, can this wait? why should i build this now? can users do without this via work arounds?

Making Bitcoin educational content that is both informative and not overbearing for newbies! It's a balancing act. Bitcoin is a pretty large technical beast as we all know, so trying to dissect the information into an easy narrative has been a challenge.

My background is point of sale, and I realized when bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, I could help with the transition from a dollar to a bitcoin standard there. In doing this, I built a product that can also be used in retail and b2b sales here in the states, while also orange-pilling merchants through a fully integrated business management and point of sale system that takes credit cards and bitcoin with full reporting on all payment methods. Restaurant staff can carry the app on their own devices and integrate with the main system - no more waiting for a manager who may or may not know how to work a wallet, or the cook with their bitcoin wallet to come to the table to present a QR code. Yes, both of these types of interactions have happened to me when trying to pay at a business that 'took' bitcoin. AlpacaRMS fixes this problem.

Working on bitcoin is an opportunity to advance money as we know it, and that's exciting.

I think Bitcoin as a protocol is the future of money. I love that it is by nature international and permissionless. Just like sending an email. This literally opens up the world as a single economy.

I think the best way we can help make this happen is to build with Bitcoin.

The purpose is to provide Bitcoin users with fast access to loans without needing to trade their bitcoins.

I have a background in building products and companies in FinTech and Legal Tech. I also have a bitcoin problem. More efficient to combine my bitcoin habit into my working hours, frees up a lot of space for activities.

I (Thibaud) have been earning 100% in bitcoin for almost 2 years now. That comes with a few challenges. Being a freelancer in bitcoin is awesome. That being said, finding various companies offering regular part-time gigs is hard. Invoicing clients can be time-consuming as you often bill in USD and get paid in BTC. On the flip side, if you are a bitcoin business looking for part-time talent, it's the jungle out there. Check out Upwork... lots of "crypto or blockchain" devs but bitcoin is nowhere to be seen. We experienced these two realizations and thought that we could improve on that. Also it would be awesome to allow more people to work on bitcoin part-time but who are not ready or willing to commit to it full yet as of yet.

I got tired of using my talents writing code for projects that I am not proud of. By building on Bitcoin I get to scratch an ideological itch and hopefully do my part to bring us closer to life on a Bitcoin Standard. If not me, then who energy.

Bitcoin is simply the best money that exists. But I really got here through the completely unrelated avenue of wanting a censorship-resistant social media. The fact that the only protocol really living up to the promise was the one created by bitcoiners just demonstrates how focused bitcoiners are on real solutions rather than hype.

Sound Money can fix the world.

But, people have to be able to hold onto their sound money safely :)

fix the money, fix the world. fiat is broken and we wanna play out part in fixing it, one meme at a time.

Hope! Hope for a better world on the other side of the crumbling Fiat empire. But a less hyperbolic answer: realizing that the process of achieving hyperbitcoinization will require many more new Bitcoiners to be educated in a more accessible, friendly, and less daunting way. And at a faster rate too! Usually, the process of orange-pilling yourself or others can take many years, at least it has done historically. Bitcoin education has come a long way, but it's still not quite there when you consider an Apple-like "it just works" experience. Jippi is positioned pretty well to craft some magical experiences tailored toward the average person.

BTCRetailX was a placeholder name until we came up with something better. It was a mouthful and got complaints all the time.
So we knew we would be rebranding at some point as well as redesigning the GUI. So my bitcoin buddy (a graphic design artist among other talents) from Charlotte, Jacob Parrish, actually came up with Alpaca when we were bantering about animal names for a point of sale system - many animals were already taken. I had to think a bit about it and realized that in an Alpaca, we have a hard working pack animal, and then we came up with the graphic image, and the name and the image took off.

😅 all brilliant and hardworking

Is this question for BtcTestnetCoins - Facilitating access to Bitcoin testnet coins. SN: @asterisk32 ?

Adding my 2sats on the development side. Having test environments results in better final products for all users. We are able to test all functions thoroughly, including edge cases that are totally impossible with real BTC.

In the physique world, one cannot "undo." In the digital world, you can, and its a huge advantage to be able to do so.

GM

This will reveal my pre-existing bias, but I'm excited for shopstr because despite lots of PoC decentralized markets being built (in fact, censorship-resistant markets was the original idea of nostr), none of them have really reached maturity.

I also think cascadr is really cool. The concept itself is really good, but they're doing some neat design work under the hood as well.

Thanks for the kind words @TheWildHustle . Since you're an S9 aficionado I will be sure to alert you as soon as we have our S9 package available (you can see the update on the TopBuilder Github Issue comment #1

For this version we allow. you to exchange calls through your ChatGPT API keys for sats but plan to add support for some other things soon.

@TheWildHustle We have an recently opened request on our Github to add Clams Remote to Start9 https://github.com/clams-tech/Remote/issues/221

We will be bugging @farscapian every few weeks to check on progress :)

@TheWildHustle - Sentinel is solid. Huge market for this

Branta has adjacent functionality coming soon 🚀

Also adding broader/deeper wallet support. Drop any wallets/software you'd like to see supported below 👇

I love them all, everyone is working so hard!

Let’s share this everywhere Ben, Bitcoin builders never get enough attention.

🤙onward

This probably depends on the product.

I needed Branta, so I was the first customer.

There was a total void of Antivirus-esq products focused on guarding my stack. Custodying Bitcoin on a consumer computer/laptop is risky. Moreso if you are building software on Bitcoin Core, playing with TOR, configs, etc. From there, I wanted my family to have Branta. And my friends, and so on.

Good question! I've spent the last 2 years building the education app I wish I had when I was being orange-pilled back in 2020. Now that Jippi has a prototype MVP on TestFlight, we're opening up a waitlist to get our beta app in front of users. We'll then test our assumptions/hypothesis to see what works and doesn't work, then we'll iterate quickly on features until we get the engagement we want. Lots of analytics and speaking to users!

Current legacy infrastructure for legal spend is $1T annually in US, $2T globally.

$9B of that is online dispute resolution (ODR) tools, $15B by 2030.

By taking the best of the conventional ODR principles and deploying it on open-source protocols like Bitcoin, Nostr, and Fedimint, the result is a protocol for Open Source Justice. That is our goal. Our co-founder Aaron of @Resolvr has a longer article on this here: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/legal/open-source-justice-on-resolvr.

We are starting with something we can do close to home, resolving hacking bounties-- using that to bootstrap the protocol. We see Replit and HackerOne as incumbent competition, they combine for maybe $2B in market cap. We like our chances.

I was just day dreaming about some of growth strategy we'll be trying, so thought I'd outline some more of them here, as a more detailed response to your second question.

As I mentioned, we're gunna lean heavily on SN meme mondays for a few weeks. We still need to refine the product a fair bit, and getting some early alpha testers on board from SN would be ideal :) we'll work with them to refine our app and get a better feel for what sort of things we can build into the core product.

Also, our CMO (Chief Meme Officer) will be reaching out to active memers on Twitter, Nostr and SN etc. He'll be handling most of the user engagement and will be in the trenches talking to users and gathering feedback.

Another thing we're really excited to experiment with is going to be 3rd party integrations. Think of how Giphy have integrated into WhatsApp.

Most likely, our first port of call for integrations will be Nostr. It's permissionless so no waiting around. There are loads of meme lords on Nostr. We'll implementing various Nostr related features, and be setting up a Nostr relay with the goal of reaching towards our 1,000 and 10,000 user marks. The Nostr integration will come with various other tools to help meme creators reach their potential. We have a bunch of other exciting back-of-the-napkin ideas on this front that still need hashing out, but should start to come into focus by the 2nd round of the contest.

Reaching 100,000 users will require us to branch out of the Bitcoin ecosystem. The goal would be to tap into a large platform and draw new users in from there. I'd say we'll do something like: 2 week sprints, build an MVP integration, see if hits, if it doesn't, then scrap it and go back to the drawing board and try a different angle. Rinse and repeat until we tap a rich vein of ore.

I tried this approach with a previous project and eventually got a big hit and millions of views: first, I built a Discord Extension, no one used it, then I tried an Android App, same thing, then I tried a Twitch extension... The Twitch extension blew up and racked up 3m views which converted into about 100k views on the website that accompanied the extension.

hey! overall, the design of the site has been heavily influenced by SN. and to your question specifically, the design of the feed came quite naturally really. it's essentially the classic instagram style infinite feed mashed up with the WhatsApp concept of emoji "reactions". the reason this came naturally stems from the core concept of the site: the core building blocks of the site are memes and emojis, so the most natural way to combine those two elements seemed to me to be reacting to memes with emojis. initially we had planned to include zapping a la SN too, but that was dropped somewhere down the line and we settled on **all ** zaps being attached to an emoji reaction.

your second question is a good one! since our app is only 3 weeks old, and isn't even officially launched yet, we haven't yet had an opportunity to pursue growth. however, that'll be the absolute priority going forward, since the site is almost at an alpha stage. I tend to look at growth dynamically. e.g. what we need to do to get 100 users will be different to what we'll do to get our first 1000 users, 10,000 users etc. so, first focus is to get 100 users, and we'll probably lean heavily on SN for that. keep and eye out for upcoming Meme Mondays :D

Gosh I am sorry I'll post here,

yopaki: https://yopaki.com

pleblab: https://pleblab.dev

neo: https://prjctlazrus.com

lnplay: https://lnplay.guide

Hey @satoshiplanet! Good question. On Plebwork, a pleb creates an account, link a bitcoin wallet and can get paid directly by their clients. Everything is handled in a chat between the client and pleb, and invoices are automatically sent out once a pleb submits their work. Payment is also handled directly on Plebwork for the client with a simple QR code scan enabled by BTCPay Server. So it is 100% bitcoin, no fiat and no KYC for plebs. You can work part-time (ore more) anonymously while keeping your fiat job. Our aim is also to attract reputable bitcoin businesses that may benefit from working with part-time talent. We hope to not only solve work management and payments but also discovery for part-time bitcoin gigs. I hope this answers your question.

Currently it has around 400 DAUs on average. We're actually planning on rolling out a global stats dashboard on the site for everyone to see the number of listings, sales, and new/active users to truly build in public!

all of Nostr 🤯

Hey @Car we think the most interesting fact about WordPress in relation to Bitcoin is that it powers about 40% of all websites according to our research.

This means that by focusing on WP we can get more Bitcoin adoption all over the web ⚡

@MerryOscar over at Fountain, @kr and his podcast are a great inspiration, and of course stacker news and team!

Personally I can say:

Branta took branding inspiration from River.

Very much so! The work that the folks over at JoltzRewards (https://twitter.com/JoltzRewards) are doing is awesome. We use them for our Lightning rewards back end and we're proud to be working with them.

I think BTCPay Server is it for me. They just make the coolest stuff and they focus on compatibility across implementations. We couldn't do what we do without them.

some news! we just renamed our app from Zapmoji to zap.meme!

we liked Zapmoji, but settled on zap.meme - it's snappier, cleaner, easier to spell and just straight up dank. the rename may also have had something to do with a similar site name, zapmojo, being pretty questionable and definately NSFW...

We’re approaching education a little differently here at Jippi! We’ve found that there isn’t a “one size fits all” approach when it comes to Bitcoin education. A lot of platforms out there offer lots of long-form content like essays or extensive videos, but there isn’t an all-in-one education platform that combines:

We believe that education should be as varied as Bitcoiners themselves, so our goal is to provide tiered learning experiences:

Tier 1 - Beginner-friendly, bitesize content for quick-fire learning Tier 2 - Narrative-driven content for more immersive learning Tier 3 - A deep dive, personalized learning experience tailored to your interests

We’re just getting started! Sign up to our waitlist today: https://jippi.app/

NIP 65! But really, anything to do with indexing and discoverability. NIP 89 is also really useful for helping people find special purpose clients, and NIP 01's relay hints are super important for helping people who are different relays find the content you're pointing at.

I think we've only really begun to discover solutions to the problem of network partitioning, there is a lot of research still to be done in this area. The fact that kind 10002 is mutable means that you can't easily look up people's relay selections at a point in time. Relay hints are set in stone, but easily become stale. I don't know what a decentralized indexing solution would look like, but this is part of what I mean when I talk about "de-commodifying relays". Relays should have different data sets, and reconciling/navigating them should be core to what nostr does.

Some folks say the developer experience is much worse than LND. This may have been the case a few years ago, but my sense is that this is unfair.

I actually identify as a vampire.

We should have a StartOS package out on the community by the end of next month (out of my hands, dependent on S9 team's bandwidth)

But if you really want to, just bring your device into Pleblab and I'll flash it on there right now.

Lack of awareness by both institutions and users

Volatility is always a concern for most users.

However there will always be incentive for users to take loans against their bitcoin holdings as opposed to selling it.

It came down to community for me. I tried other lightning implementation services, but the unconditional help and service that I got from the Breez team was unmatched. They could have easily seen that I am a young 20-year-old kid and not believe in my project, but they didn't. And, not only did they believe in my project, they gave me support when I needed it, and were always eager to help.

Also, the SDK is extremely well-built which allowed me to focus more on the new features I wanted to add to my lightning wallet rather than the lightning infrastructure itself.

How does your tool help with learning bitcoin script? Does it teach me the script types in Bitcoin? Does it give me an ide for running scripts? Does it go into miniscript at all?

Learn script? hmmm maybe not? But a necessity for working on Bitcoin.

Learn how script is a critical part of inputs & how inputs are a critical part of a transaction? Yes! Needed to understand Bitcoin under the hood.