I think I had hopes that the initial sidechain proposal by blockstream would have panned out. I think that would have lead to rapid experimentation and development but it never came to fruition.

I haven't looked enough into BIP-300/Drivechains but they offer a similar promise. I'd love to better understand the arguments against it but in general would love to get something like it eventually. Perhaps the best we can do are federations like liquid and fedimint though.

With that said, I am generally a proponent of the 'take it slow and don't break things' approach when it comes to bitcoin. It's definitely not the way you should build a business but when it comes to a once-in-a-human-history project like bitcoin I'd prefer to make sure we don't screw it up.

Hm, this is a tough one. I'm not really in touch with a lot of bitcoiners so I'm not entirely sure this is a major disagreement but it definitely feels like one.

I think in order to scale non-custodial bitcoin to the entire world we will likely need to scale the block-size at some point. I think something conservative that grows along-side the growth of technology (bandwidth/cpu/storage/etc) might make sense.

Otherwise we probably need to be okay with a significant portion of the world using centralized or federation-based custody.

I knew I wanted to work on/with bdk and ldk so I wrote up a proposal that outlined roughly a years worth of work and submitted it to Spiral. There was a little back-and-forth where they explained the process and expectations a little more clearly and could get a better understanding of what I wanted to work on.

They were pretty flexible as my plans did end up changing quite a lot compared to what I originally proposed. Initially my plan was to focus primarily on DLCs but building out a lightning node (sensei) with bdk+ldk ended up being the core of my work.

I hope that as companies realize how important bitcoin is for the world (and their company) that they will prioritize funding the ecosystem as a core part of their business as Block (and a few others) have.

I think in the short term the biggest obstacles are that of education. A lot of people don't understand the current monetary system, the problems with it, and why bitcoin is a better solution.

In the longer term I think there are lots of scalability issues that need to be figured out if non-custodial bitcoin for the entire world is a goal of the project.

Hey -- was nice finally meeting you (and lots of other people!) in person at btc++.

I think one important thing that helped me succeed was to always try to align my work with my interests. When you are naturally curious and interested in what you are working on it makes the difficult times much easier to persevere through.

I wish I had the answers. I think there's a few levels of education needed depending on the target audience. There's a pretty significant lack of technical/developer level education imo and is an area I hope to contribute to in the near future. There's a decent amount of higher level education around 'why bitcoin' but it's not widely distributed.

I think people can help by focusing on a smaller niche of the broader ecosystem and creating focused content. We'd probably then need a mechanism to organize all of the content into a better structure for mass consumption. Open to other's ideas!

I think maybe the most 'obvious' fit for Sensei could be as a completely open-sourced greenlight alternative (though I think they have plans to eventually open-source the backend).

Another interesting use-case for Sensei might be for businesses who conceptually like the idea of LDK and have plans down-the-road to require a more customized lightning experience but don't have the resources to start down that path today.

They can start with Sensei (a LDK based node) and easily migrate their entire infrastructure to their future custom ldk based node without having to 'start over'. They can migrate their existing channels and funds without real downtime.

I think it's early days for Sensei and I'm confident it will find its niche as its feature set gets more developed. Stay tuned :)

Nope, not at all. I had a decent salary as a software engineer but started out at 22 with a couple grand in my bank account from odd jobs I worked at in college.

The main thing it has done is free me to completely focus on what I want to work on without worrying about my salary.

It's a great question. With custodial Sensei and use-cases like you describe lnbits/lndhub are probably better solutions.

We are working on integrating with the VLS (validated lightning signer) project to enable remote signing for all of the nodes run on a sensei instance. Once this lands you'll be able to spin up your own personal blockstream greenlight alternative running entirely from your own instance instead of relying on blockstream's servers.

There are likely some other use cases, maybe in gaming, where you (as the game developer) don't want to deal with the regulations that come into play when you are custody'ing bitcoin and so sensei w/ remote signing might be a good solution.

Even without the remote signing, there might be some research-y use-cases around simulation/testing different network topologies where you want to simulate and control thousands of nodes easily.

Hey! Yeah that was a project I put together for the impervious hackathon. It's still unclear if it's really a good idea to use lightning to move data back and forth like this does. In reality I'd love to find a way to do the same thing but just use lightning for pay-per-execution. I think you can pretty much do this type of thing with LSATs but would still be nice to build a little framework around it. I'd also love to find a way to enable 'trustless' code execution where you can pay someone to run the function for you but have proof they didn't modify the code that is run. I think there's a way to do this as some future extension of ideas used in DLCs.

Once VLS is integrated it's probably a workable solution if you need to be non-custodial. The problem is that the partner orgs would still need to run some kind of long-running daemon (the signer) so if they can do that they probably can just run their own CLN/LND node.

I guess once some of the LSP functionality lands in Sensei then there might be an argument that you could essentially manage liquidity for their nodes for them without them needing to deal with it. They'd still need to run the signer though.

I'm not a lawyer but it's also possible even running Sensei in custodial mode (keys are in memory on the machine) might not count as custodial in the legal sense. You can set it up so they still log in with their own username/passphrase and this passphrase encrypts the seed on disk so you never have direct access to it. This is the voltage model and they largely claim to the non-custodial (as far as I know).

I guess it largely depends on the exact requirements?

Best way to go from idea to product would be to try to come up with a way to cheaply test your idea. It could be as simple as setting up a type-form or some other way to survey your potential customer base to find out if they'd pay for whatever product you have in mind.

I got my first customers the old fashioned way by picking up the phone and calling them. Since we initially were focused on merchants accepting bitcoin (bitpay was mainly only option back then) we were able to find a list of bitpay merchants and looked up their contact information on their website.

After talking to enough of them we learned they didn't really want the initial product but we did learn a ton about what they wanted. We collected and reflected on all the feedback and we were able to steer the product in a direction that some of those initial phone calls turned into our initial customers.

I try not to focus too much on the price. I believe in the same set of core principals that are unrelated to the actual day-to-day price of bitcoin. I also focus most of my efforts on making sure I am always learning and building.

It actually started as a bitcoin company that ended up pivoting away from btc in 2014 because our potential customers didn't seem to care about bitcoin or even knew what it was even though they were accepting it via bitpay at the time.

At the highest level we were helping merchants sell more goods by building better relationships with their customers. We were able to align our revenue with our customers so we earned more the more we helped them grow theirs.

I'm not sure if it's the most surprising but one thing I learned was that it's okay to enter a market that has competitors (and is often a good sign if others are doing it) as long as you have a way to differentiate yourself. Initially we followed (i think, paul graham's?) advice to do things that don't scale. We provided manual customization and other 'enterprise'-like services to smaller customers and made sure they were happy with us as a way to bootstrap early revenue.

Eventually we were able to split the business into one that offered both a self-service and more enterprise services.

Thanks! I always try to stay humble so it means a lot to me that you said that.

I haven't actually read many btc books actually. I only have read the more technical ones (programming bitcoin, mastering bitcoin, mastering lightning network, etc). Since I'm largely focused on lightning these days I'll say mastering lightning network is my favorite btc book :)

Non bitcoin book, I guess I have to go with cryptonomicon since it's where my pseudonym comes from.

As for my building journey I don't think there's really a book I would recommend there. I think I've learned way more by actually building and then reading and watching docs/guides/tutorials/youtube to help get me unstuck.

Hard to pinpoint something that I would want to tell my younger self other than to mine bitcoin in 2009. I don't have many regrets in my life thus far, things have worked out pretty well.

I think maybe I would have said to not spend so much time playing video games. While I think they ultimately lead me towards becoming a software engineer, I probably spent way too much time with them when I was in middle/high school.

I'm not too familiar with them at the moment. It sounds like they can potentially provide a slightly better custodial experience so it probably makes sense to add support to sensei for them. Will look more into it soon!

I don't love price predictions but my conservative estimate would be for $500K by 2050. I think at a minimum it replaces the market for gold as sov.