Great to hear from you! Nothing from Tahinis yet - they are hard to pin down :) But the business is going well. For brick & mortar, we've landed on our reward spinner that a business can pull up on a tablet - the customer checks out and then gets the chance to spin the wheel. Hopefully we will have more POS integrations too, but for the time being this is a nice solution. Hoping to get this live in a restaurant down in Bitcoin Jungle very soon!

Definitely - for bitcoin businesses, our offering is not surprisingly a no-brainer. Even for more technical teams, they'd rather use a service vs. building a whole rewards and Lightning stack themselves. And the good news is with the number of bitcoin businesses growing, that's also good for our business.

BUT, our main learning is that it's still very early for non-bitcoin businesses. I'm repasting below something I shared in another post below to give you a sense of what that dialogue commonly looks like and how we're looking to use Taproot Assets to move us forward. Basically Taproot Assets help us put in smaller stepping stones to bridge businesses from where we are today to full-blown bitcoin rewards in the future.

Looking forward, I'm expecting these stepping stones will finally enable us to move the needle forward for traditional businesses and in 5-10 years I'd hope we have a vibrant loyalty network built on top of Lightning with users being able to easily exchange different loyalty units of value and convert them into sats. In the interim there's probably a lot we will need to do around infrastructure for Taproot Assets, and I'm sure we'll see Lightning itself continue to evolve as well.

Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother.

So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.

Great question. If "fate" here means ultimately fading away vs. Bitcoin, I hope they eventually do! I just see them as an important interim stepping stone to that future state whether it's via supporting stablecoins on Lightning or other use cases that can serve as additional ways by which people stumble their way onto the Bitcoin network (vs. getting bogged down elsewhere).

I'm repasting below something I shared in another post to give you a flavor of what those interim stepping stones look like for us at Joltz in a loyalty & rewards context:

Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother.

So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.

For those couple of years after we got acquired, I suppose that's true. I also suppose we all feed the beast anytime we pay taxes or shop at businesses that then pay taxes, etc.

You definitely shouldn't blindly trust me just like you shouldn't blindly trust anyone. But I hope that my proof of work w/ nearly 200 bitcoin educational videos on my YT channel (https://www.youtube.com/@IanMajor) is at least a start for what this all means to me.

Thank you! Brutal choice, but I'm going pizza

Great question - I can't say there have been cases where businesses have implemented and not found it successful (though I'm sure there will inevitably be some). However, we do talk with businesses who are hesitant or just not ready for it.

Here's an albeit lengthy post I just posted on Twitter to a somewhat similar question for how we're looking to address that :)

Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother.

So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.

I've always had a disdain for authority and valued free markets etc. Read Ayn Rand as a teenager which finally put words to a lot of what I intuitively felt. Then once I finally learned more about how money works and how integral it is to society and found Bitcoin it just all clicked on what an imperative this is for humanity. So fundamentally I want to see money separated from the State, and how I hope to support that goal is helping accelerate bitcoin adoption through what I do with my YT channel and what we're doing with Joltz.

Reaching hyperbitcoinization implies so many things, it's hard to predict what it will be like! I imagine businesses will still have to compete in the marketplace, and rewards are one way they can do that. But instead of a differentiator like they would be now, perhaps in the future bitcoin rewards will be commoditized like traditional points programs are today. If that's the case I won't be too sad about it :)

Definitely! Our protocol of choice for these use cases is Taproot Assets which essentially allow for adding arbitrary asset metadata to UTXOs for users to mint and transfer these assets. A lot of the data is stored off-chain (which is a big positive vs. something like Ordinals) in something called Universes which enable users to query information about different assets. It uses Bitcoin for double spend protection, and some of the pieces we got with the Taproot upgrade help enforce supply caps of these different assets as well. You can read more at Lightning Labs' website here: https://docs.lightning.engineering/the-lightning-network/taproot-assets

It's worth starting with the pain points in traditional rewards systems which typically boil down to 2 main categories: lack of value and lack of flexibility.

And so:

-Bitcoin the asset preserves reward purchasing power over time instead of eroding it like w/ traditional points and miles (and the rate at which that purchasing power erodes can be crazy - I talked about this in a recent podcast with Natalie Brunell: )

-Bitcoin the network can connect what were previously siloed units of loyalty value that don't / can't talk to each other and give users more optionality in exchanging value. Similar to how people like Jack Mallers talk about the merits of Lightning as this interoperable, open network for intermediating fiat currencies, we see a similar possibility for different units of loyalty value

This is the hypothesis at least! Still in progress of testing said hypothesis :)

Hustle absolutely should! Tomorrow is the halving party :)

Great question - I can't say the needle has moved much for (non-bitcoin) businesses just yet, although I can feel it shifting when it comes to investors. It's still a bit early for businesses and I'm going to re-paste something I shared on another post that explains what that dialogue often sounds like and what we're doing to hopefully start addressing it!

Today, jumping straight to bitcoin is too big of a leap for the vast majority of businesses - I can give the best sales pitch in the world of why they should integrate bitcoin rewards (new customer acquisition, etc.), but they'll inevitably ask "well what about my existing customer base?" -- the answer of course is that maybe 10-20% of them would opt-in. At that point the business says well why bother. So they need a way to increase that %. One way to do this is with branded (fungible) loyalty tokens that look and feel much more like a normal loyalty point to consumers (plus no business wants to willingly sacrifice the branding attached to their loyalty program). You can still back those assets with BTC, but it's packaged in a more accessible-looking vessel. Another thing you could do is back it with stablecoins instead of BTC - I know that sounds cringe to us, but now you've really removed every objection a business might have. If many businesses do this, it also gives consumers the ability to much more easily exchange these different forms of value vs. what they have today. And of course they can always convert into sats, and at least you've gotten people onto the network from which they can easily do that.

I tend to think of the halving as creating the conditions in which a demand catalyst will make price really run - with the ETFs we could argue we already have that. With that said, I think the bigger impact is that bitcoin supply has come off exchanges aggressively since 2020 which has never happened before and I think has had a bigger absolute impact on available supply than this next halving will.

All of that is to say I think fireworks are in store but likely on a lagged effect to the halving as it usually is :)

Great question. The main thing we've been working on lately is a non-custodial wallet that will plug into our different reward solutions so after a user claims a reward it automatically goes to their own self-custody. If a govt agency came and demanded information we simply wouldn't have anything to give them. I'm sure there could be other compliance crap we may have to navigate as a business that is unrelated to our users, but we'd try and avoid that as much as possible.

Yo yo! Appreciate the love my dude. Fun time to be alive

Are you a full time shill, or part time?

It's like we're "jolting" awake a business' sleepy rewards program :) I dunno - we thought it sounded cool and somewhat Lightning-y haha

Yep "breakage" is the % of reward value that goes unclaimed. Once a user claims their rewards to their own self-custody the business will of course no longer be able to do anything about it, but up until that point any unclaimed value could always be rolled over or returned back to their reward budget. One of the businesses we're talking to about this even wants to take a portion of the breakage and use it to establish a corporate treasury position in bitcoin!

I like RGB and hope to see some sort of a bridge between RGB and TAs. I think Bitmask maybe has been looking at this if I'm not mistaken. We prioritized TAs given our usage of LND elsewhere in our tech stack but will come back to other protocols like RGB as the space develops